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by jrochkind1 4719 days ago
WebObjects is kind of like Rails, but 20 years earlier. (Seriously, it's actually very similar to Rails, in it's bones. I don't know if dhh had seen WebObjects, or they just both had seen some smalltalk mvc framework)

They inherited it from NeXT, and it seriously was really ahead of it's time originally. Hell, it was a technically competent and competitive web framework through, oh, 2002 or 2004, maybe even a few years after that. (Can you tell I used to develop for it?)

But it ended up not being a market Apple wanted to be in, selling a web development framework, and it didn't get much attention, it withered on the vine. (Even if it had... 20 years of legacy is not good for a web framework, it would probably still suck by now -- and who wants a proprietary rather than open source web framework, if they can avoid it?). But they kept using it internally anyway long after they stopped marketting it or selling it externally.

Anyhow, it's really hilarious if the legacy WebObjects part of Apple's web infrastructure are actually the parts that are still up. Hilarious in a pleasant way for those of us who used to use and love WebObjects back in the day.

3 comments

As one example, WebObjects powered the BBC News Online site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News_Online) at launch in 1997.

I was brought in as a contractor in the last few months, so I didn't get much of an overview, but I wrote template code (each page, and each component of a page, had three associated files: .wos for 'scripting', .html for templating, and .wod for 'declarations' to tie the other two together).

It was streets ahead of anything I'd previously used (mainly PHP code with intermingled HTML), and led me to build my next major project using XSLT to provide some insulation between the logic and presentation.

That _could_ be a prime example of security by obscurity. Who would spend time looking for a WebObjects exploit if you can spend that time looking for a Rails exploit?
Someone who wants to post youtube videos on hacking apple developer accounts?
Yes - this would be another feather in the cap for the old NeXT engineers (and I suppose the folks who have worked to update it since...)