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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger
Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store."
I haven't actually developed with WebObjects; my web-programming background has been either LAMP or JSP/J2EE, but I've noticed that many of the worst, most non-responsive web-pages are designed with WebObjects. (You can tell by the URLs.) I don't know if that means that people programming with WebObjects have on average less training and architectural design experience, or if it's ultimately a more broken architecture, but personally it would take a lot for me to ever consider it as an architectural choice.
Murray Todd Williams
A few questions that are unanswered by the article and Apple's store. Does Mac OS X client include a deployment license? What about Mac OS X server? What about deployment licenses for other platforms, like Solaris or Linux? I think a fair number of existing WebObjects deployments are on platforms other than Mac OS X.
The article quoted only explains the WebObjects DEVELOPMENT environment.
While Apple did give you free WebObjects 5.3 Development on every XCode 2.1, you have to buy a MacOS X Tiger Server to run the applications. Yes, you can still build a WAR file to deploy the application on Tomcat/JBoss/Jetty but you still need the server license to deploy your applications.
The old way (pay $699usd, you get development environment on Mac and Windows, plus deployment on any JVM):
You can deploy WebObjects 5.0 to 5.2.4 applications on any Windows, Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and even FreeBSD with a compliant JVM. In short, WebObjects 5.0 - 5.2.4, you spent $699 usd to buy from Apple (I bought my copy $88 usd from eBay. Apple used to has student developer discount for $99 usd).
The New Way ("Free development license, but $$$$ on each deployment license from Tiger server):
Enough said, starting from 5.3, you've to buy the license for each deployment license.
Anyway I'm pissed because I like to write apps on my Powerbook, and deploy the apps to my Debian Linux server running Apache with mod_webobjects adaptor. I would never switch to a Apple machine running Tiger Server.
Look I love WebObjects... with all the Direct To Web and the EOF goodies, it runs circles around Ruby on Rails and the EJB/JDO toys... but I felt being sold by Apple this time.
-cocoa ninja
This is true, although there are a couple of open source projects (GNUstepWeb begin one, I can't remember the name of the other) which are open source versions of WebObjects 4.5, the last version to use Objective-C instead of Java. To me, they are more interesting, since they allow me to write Web, GNUstep and Cocoa front-ends to exactly the same back-end code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
According to an article at AppleInsider.com: "Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment used for rapidly building and deploying web-based applications." Perhaps releasing the dev kit for free is just the first step to going open source with it.
Apple, apple, apple... all I really want is xcode to have as good as support for LAMP (PHP mainly) as it does with java and obj c.. please apple, pretty please.....
Later,
Phil
The real story should be, "Apple decides to kill what's left of WebObjects by limiting deployment to Mac OS X servers, which almost nobody uses."
Yes, WebObjects is now free to develop under Tiger and free to deploy under Tiger server. But the real story is that Apple no longer offers licenses to deploy WebObjects on any other platform - at any price. Probably 99% of existing WebObjects deployments are on non-Apple boxes. Goodbye, WebObjects!
[Christian Kent] I was forwarded this today by a Macintosh MPEG software developer:
Okay, stop, I have to make an argument about why this article fails, before I explode. MySQL has a disgusting tendency to fork() at random moments, which is bad for performance essentially everywhere but Linux. OS X server includes a version of MySQL that doesn't have this issue.
No real arguments that Power Macs are somewhat behind the times on memory latency, but that's because they're still using PC3200 DDR1 memory from 2003. AMD/Intel chips use DDR2 or Rambus now ... this could be solved without switching CPUs.
The article also goes out of its way to get bad results for PPC. Why are they using an old version of GCC (3.3.x has no autovectorization, much worse performance on non-x86 platforms), then a brand spanking new version of mySQL (see above)? The floating point benchmark was particularly absurd: "The results are quite interesting. First of all, the gcc compiler isn't very good in vectorizing. With vectorizing, we mean generating SIMD (SSE, Altivec) code. From the numbers, it seems like gcc was only capable of using Altivec in one test, the third one. In this test, the G5 really shows superiority compared to the Opteron and especially the Xeons" In fact, gcc 3.3 is unable to generate AltiVec code ANYWHERE, except on x86 where they added a special SSE mode because x87 floating point is so miserable. This could have been discovered with about 5 minutes of Google research. It wouldn't had to have been discovered at all if they hadn't gone out of their way to use a compiler which is the non-default on OS X 10.4. Alarm bells should have been going off in the benchmarkers head when an AMD chips outperforms an Intel one by 3x, but, anyway ...
I hate to seem like I'm just blindly defending Apple here, but this article seems to have been written with an agenda. There's no way one guy could stuff this much stuff up. To claim there's something inherently wrong with OS X's ability to be a server is going against so much publicly available information it's not even funny. Notice Apple seems to have no trouble getting Apache to run with Linux-like performance.
I use ZDE on my Powerbook and it runs Great. While it isn't free or come with the Operating system, it has helped to make me much more productive. The other bonus is that I can run in a Linux box also...
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
As I was packing up to move last weekend, I found one of the few old issues of Wired magazine that I've kept over the years that featured Steve Jobs on the cover, talking up WebObjects and what a great tool it was for rapid web application development. This was in 1996, and he was talking about how important web apps were going to be in a very short time.
Love him or hate him, he does have an eye on the future most times.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
WebObject rocks. I started using webobjects four years ago. I've been away and worked on projects in raw struts, raw jsp, have played with other frameworks in my own time, and laughed. I've written a couple of my own, and am currently part of a team working to replicate the best of WebObjects using Cayenne and Tapestry. For the most part all the alternatives *completely suck*. That people do commercial work on struts - this is laughable. It is inelegant, heavy, and yuck.
:) so I could continue to use that command-line approach in preference to the mac tools.
A few tools go some way towards recreating the success of parts of WebObjects - I've not played with Hibernate but hear it's a good. We use Cayenne, which is better in many respects (no addToBothSidesOfRelationshipWithKey - the default setters do this), although there are some bugs in the latest major release (1.1). Still, Andrus has really improved on some of the weak points of EO, and it's nice to see some people taking some pride in the interface with more recent releases of Cayenne - after fifteen years Apple (who pride themselves on their interfaces) still don't be able get the interface for EO to a point where it's acceptable. Focus doesn't work properly - there are mandatory fields hidden in strange places. And it's made awkward to work outside of the standard toolkit. All this is stupid. Stupid!
Some of the templating systems are comparable to the WOBuilder. The WOBuilder has some bugs in it, and there are templating systems around that are more powerful. Nevertheless, having now used Tapestry and the wo templating system I can see advantages to the less powerful WO system. It doesn't scale to seriously complicated pages as well as tapestry, and really is a lot less powerful, but for simple pages it's a lot quicker to make magic happen. That'll be OK for us, we're planning to hack tapestry to allow us to store the quivalent of a wod file within a single tapestry tag.
In the past, I've worked with some top notch people who develop on WebObjects. One of them is just the quintisenial guru programmer. He can look at a problem, sit down and start typing, and have a working product out in a tenth the time it would take me to produce an equivalent. Another guy is a perl guru. He's recreated the entire WebObjects development system in pure perl and moved the platform to linux. We do all our WO development on linux using text editor of choise (mostly emacs but I'm a bim type of guy) and the java libraries on linux. I have a mac laptop and had the privilege of porting them to BSD
Apple disappoints me. Releasing webobjects with the OS is a good idea, but they're not doing it to maek WebObjects the next best thing, they're just looking for an exit. The wasted opportunities are so disappointing, and the history of WebObjects is ridden with them. WebObjects is the best of breed and has been as long as it's been out. I'd love to know how the original team conceived it. Did they hire a team of people who'd worked on a web-like thin client system for unix or VMS? It has that feel about it that says that the people who pieced it together had a really good grasp of the problem they were trying to solve, and they did it near the beginning of the web application era. Don't take away the impression that WebObjects is some sort of golden hammer - it's quirky as hell. For example, instead of using List or evven Vector, every time you use a list by default you need to use a java implementation of NSArray. All the NS objects are default, and it's blatant that this is a quick port of Next's objective-C system to java. This is offputting at first as are all the other annoying interface quirks, stupidly long methods names and strange things that go wrong without meaningful explanation when you accidentally leave a colon sitting at the bottom of a wod file (binding file between the temaplted html file and java view file) but - it really is a mile ahead of all competition. Yet1 Apple have kept it on the backburner. They haven't dedicated de
It uses a different architecture altogether. WebObjects was born in 1996, before J2EE containers even existed. And it was written in Objective-C. In 2000 they rewrote WO in Java, and that's when the trouble started; they basically just rewrote the whole thing, and it looks like the work was done by the ObjC people, because they even migrated the ObjC collection classes (there was no need for this, really, they could have used the Java collection classes) and this caused a bunch of compatibility problems. A patch was released later that added conversion methods from the java collection classes to the WO foundation collection classes. And supposedly you can deploy a WO app into a J2EE container, but EOF has issues with multithreading, you have to lock a lot of stuff manually, and generally it's easier to just use the same old WO way of deploying stuff, which is via the WOMonitor, launching many instances of your application and letting the apache WO adaptor handle the load balancing. In short, you can deploy WO apps using only J2SE without a container.
Go hug some trees.
At my last job, I used WebObjects for some of our web apps. I thought it did a great job and especially like using EOModeler. One app was supposed to use data from our other apps. So the app had to talk to 4 database, 3 of which belonged to other apps in the company. We made EOModels for each of our database connections. In our main EOModel, we had a couple objects that were connected to objects in the other models. Above the EOModel, EOF totally hid that fact that I was talking to multiple databases and assembling all the object relations for me. Granted I didn all this against an Oracle database, but when the Apple Reps we pitching the IDE to us they connected an Oracle db and an Access db to prove it didn't matter where your data was.
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not only that... I heard amazing stories (from people at NeXT who worked with WO at that time) about how Sharper Image and Reebok were done in 3 days by 3 developers... the development cost I think 30K. At that time I was working here in Mexico with seccion amarilla, Sanborns, Cablevision and a couple other sites that I was writing with WO. Great tool, like you say, ahead of its time.
Go hug some trees.
And, it's a $200 mobo in a $100 case with a $60 hard drive and $100 worth of RAM.
Plus a $400 processor. Maybe $30-50 for some kind of optical drive?
Would they take a loss on each machine at $499? Perhaps a little, but it would be small.
small? wtf? Ok, so I go to dell to try and find the cheapest 3.6GHz Pentium 4 machine and I see that dimensions don't support anything near that, so the precision 380 line which starts at $649 has an option for $580 to upgrade to a 3.6GHz processor. That's $1229 for the non-math majors out there. There is no way this apple development machine comes in anywhere near your $499 price point - not with the processor it sports.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/
Now what does that URL tell you?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
well, "no fanfare" has been part of WebObjects for the last 5 years, right?
I never deployed WO apps on J2EE containers, but I remember reading on the dev lists that it was kind of troublesome because then you had to take care of all the threading stuff (something you don't have to do if you use WOMonitor an a bunch of instances). All that manual locking and unlocking of the editing contexts... does it even scale well with such bottlenecks? besides, I think a WO app on a J2EE container can't even take advantage of container-managed datasources, can it? I stopped using it on 2002/2003 so maybe the newer versions have it now...
Anyway, I hope they open source WebObjects. wotonomy is just not advancing, we don't have the time for it.
Go hug some trees.
Here's the link to the story you mentioned. This story also includes the infamous washing machine interview.
My other sig is extremely clever...
There is some confusion here. They didn't "Change the terms". What they did was LOWER THE PRICE.
It used to be you paid $699 for a box with the development environement in it, a test-deployment license, and a full deployment license. You could deploy it anywhere.
Now you pay $0 for the development system, and $499 for a copy of OSX Server for deployment.
So, if you had 4 Mac Server, before your cost was $2,800-- for 4 copies of WebObjects.
Now your cost is
So, for that situation, they lowered the price by almost $3,000.
Even if you're not using OS X Server, you have always had to buy deployment licenses, and that was $699 with the WO retail box.
Now they have basically bunded WebObjects with their client OS for FREE, and with their server OS for FREE, reducing the additional cost of WebObjects to Zero.
How is this bad again?
As to deployment on non-Mac machines, you have *always* needed a deployment license to do that, and that cost $699 before. I think its pretty safe to say that once they get this adjustment to the business model worked out, it won't cost more than $699 to deploy WO apps on non-Mac hardware.
And they may well just open source the whole thing.
Any way you cut it, this is a price cut. Yes, their support for non-mac hardware is lagging, but that's not uncommon with WO...and generally WO deployed apps stay on the old version for awhile after the new version comes out-- its not like there are a lot of commercial WO apps out there that are just waiting for 5.3.
As to open source alternatives, there are none. There are some WO developers working on essentially a replacement in open source, and that may be a great project ultimately.
But most open source methods for doing web applications pale when compared to web objects. Its unfortunate there are so many thousands of Java and Open source devleopers out there creating inferior projects and spending more time to do it, when all they need to do is use WO and have a better solution quicker.
WO is really fantastic, and its really under-estimated, and not well understood in the general community. Apple lowered the price and made the model simpler before, and all they've done here is do the same thing again.
Its not unreasonable for Apple to charge money for WebObjects-- its one hell of a great solution, and is currently unmatched in the market place, free or proprietary. For what it does, its a total bargain.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23