[danpalmer]

Looks like this hasn't been updated since 2010, and it's website doesn't load. Also the underlying Cocoa port looks like it hasn't been updated since 2008.

I think we need a totally new Objective-C framework for web development based on newer design patterns, GCD, etc, but it needs a new port of Foundation and Cocoa to Linux and other systems.

As much as I'd love an Objective-C web framework, I wouldn't use one that only ran on Mac OS, pretty useless in terms of production hosting I think.

[yoda_sl]

Agreed that if there was a modern WebObjects it should support GCD, and be at least available on Linux too. WebObjects back in the days was running on 4 different platforms: OpenStep, Windows NT, Solaris and HP-UX. so clearly the runtime was cross platform and it was relying only on the Foundation framework at runtime. None of the Cocoa framework was needed to deploy such app.

Apple moved away from different binaries per platform by switching everything to Java which solve the portability question, and additionally solved the database connectivity issues since by bring a java solution any JDBC driver available to talk to a DB will work with WebObjects.

Overall the move to java was a good move, but Apple stopped the investment in the software that NeXT created and went back to focus on desktop and devices... But they kept WebObjects internally for their own benefits I think.

[mikeash]

Wasn't Cocoa available for exactly those four platforms as well?

[yoda_sl]

No Cocoa was not available on those platform. OpenStep was running on NeXT OS, and was available from NeXT on the Windows platform. NeXT and Sun worked on getting OpenStep running on Solaris but Sun did drop the ball and switched direction by going with Java. OpenStep was never available on HP-UX, only WebObjects and PDO were truly cross platform before the switch to Java. PDO=Portable Distributed Objects which was an alternative to Corba back when Corba was such a big trends.

[mikeash]

Odd, Apple lists patches for OpenStep on both Solaris and HP-UX: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA45376?viewlocale=en_US

[yoda_sl]

I think the Apple doc is slightly inaccurate: the OpenStep part which include a graphic user interface was not available on HP-UX but the non graphic part: WebObjects, Enterprise Objects Framework, and Portable Distributed Objects was available. Looks like Wikipedia has avoid history of OpenStep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

[mikeash]

Searching around, I find quite a lot of pages that mention NeXT's implementation of the OpenStep API for HP-UX, but none that mention that it's only the non-GUI parts. Are you sure?