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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger
Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store."
http://www.apple.com/webobjects/
Doesn't that 999$ include a (lease) of a computer system? It's not just the price of the software...
Maybe you'd rather they buy you a Mac and give you all the software, including the source, for free? Or better yet, they should give you a Mac, PAY you to use it, and give you all the software for free. That will really help Apple thrive...
. . . Well, the average Tiger user will also never use the developer toolkit that came with the OS, but that doesn't stop Apple from including it, does it? Why does something have to be useful to every user to be released?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I managed to answer some of my questions by looking at http://www.apple.com/webobjects/. Tiger Client includes a development license for WebObjects. Tiger Server includes a deployment license.
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
Is there a database that comes with it too?
... on a classic three-tier architecture with intrinsic clustering support... deliver maintainable, scalable applications... create enterprise-level web services backed by robust business logic ...object-oriented frameworks to transparently use the automated data persistence..."
Well, here's what the WebObjects home page has this to say on the subject:
"..extends your reach by ensuring flexible, maintainable design... build or use standards-based web services.. enable code-free generation, configuration and testing... standards-based web services... opening up enterprise development
Having read that, I can quite confidently say that I have NFI.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
What for? I still got my Claris Home Page 3.0. Makes web pages that download easily are are compatible with 99% of the browsers in use. Runs great under Classic too.
EOF -- an object relational mapper, providing isolation from the database and from the database model -- in particular is very, very nice. Not the final answer to everything, but still quite cool :-)
The sad thing with Apple's current WebObjects is that it's only java (it's even a J2EE environment), while originally (at NeXT) it was Objective-C based (plus WebScript, an ObjC-like script language). They dropped the Objective-C bit with WebObjects 5, sadly (4.5 had ObjC and Java). Well, ok, beeing a J2EE env has its own advantages, but still...
The documentation of WO 4.5 is here, the documentation for the current WO is here.
There is a free software implementation of WebObjects 4.5 from the GNUstep project, GNUstepWeb, which work well. OpenGroupware.org also has its own WO 4.5 implementation, NGObjWeb, which works very well too (it's the foundation of SOPE). I wrote an article showing how to do simple (html) components, but it's in french ;-)
Though, if you want to discover a really interesting project, have a look to Seaside. It's inspired by WebObjects, with an excellent component model, but is even better (support of continuations, etc). And it's completely dynamic, letting you change things at runtime easily (Smalltalk rulez ;-). It's one of the best thing I know :-)
And some of the best Web sites have been done using WebObjects, including the Apple Store (http://www.apple.com/store) and the entire infrastructure for iTunes. Don't blame the tool for lousy site workflow.
However, I would say that the people who program in WO tend to understand a great deal about software architecture and theoretical IT issues - but in truth, many WO programmers are former NeXT GUI programmers who always will look on the Web as a bastard UI.
WebObjects is a fantastic development environment, a hell of a lot nicer than JSP/J2EE, but requires substantially more training than the lamp stack.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
There has been a discussion about this a few days ago at heise.de (this is rather old news from the last Apple Developer meeting, but was buried under the big news of switch to Intel).
...
The news seems to boil down to this:
a) WebObjects Development (not deployment) is included in XCode and therefore free.
b) WebObjects Deployment is included for free with Tiger Server.
c) Other licences aren't available any longer. So that means, that you'll have to buy MacOS Tiger Server to get a valid licence. Deployment on all other platforms isn't supported any longer (it should work, cause it's java only, but there's no guarantee).
If Apple doen't change its mind on point c, this news is not good news
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I have been developing a hosted application (Application as a Service) with WebObjects and I must say it has completely spoiled me over all these other technologies. I have been able to rollout release after release of high quality, maintainable, fast and scalable code. I have used quite a few other technologies except for Ruby and .Net, but I really cannot believe that productivity I have had with WebObjects. Plus, its caching has made people comment on "is this really a web application".
It so far has played nicely with other frameworks, like jFreeChart, and I cannot recommend WebObjects enough.
It kind of reminds me of some article I read where a company chose to use LISP. They were able to constantly stay ahead of the competition etc., until Yahoo bought them out. Well, WebObjects has been our secret weapon and we are able to run rings around the competition wih our productivity.
- jimijon
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
Right here.
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
Disney uses WebObjects for booking vacations to Disneyland, Disneyworld and Disneycruise. See this URL I just pulled from their site:
O bjects/TravelDLIBC.woa/
/ IndvGate?Request=CustomerInquiry
:)
http://dlr.reservations.disney.go.com/cgi-bin/Web
TIAA-CREF, an institutional and individual investment house has over 200+ WebObjects applications still in productcion. Here's another live URL:
https://ais2.tiaa-cref.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects.exe
Those are just a few of the "small" companies using WebObjects
I've been developing in J2EE for over 3 years now (WebObjects before that) and I can say that nothing beats EOF. Entity EJBs are still way too slow of a technology to get up and running. The change notification and delegation that is present in the EOF framework stack is so powerful and the level of caching that's given to the developer are way too easy. Hibernate, CMP EJBs and JDO don't compare. Note that Apple was actually on the JDO specification board. I'm not sure if they voted for or against JDO but it was interesting to see they were on the board. Maybe there were thoughts creating a specification around EOF? HAHAHA!
The programming language is mostly irrelevant. WebObjects uses Java simply because that's better known by programmers. What WebObjects brings to the table is exactly what OS X does - ridiculously complete and versatile object frameworks. Who cares what code glues together these objects? It's the richness of the framekworks that matters. Anybody who does J2EE or .Net should really look into it. Every application we have reviewed lately that was built on WebObjects works great. We even bought one of them.
IIRC, the USPS uses WebObjects for a number of systems. I sure love their new "automated postal systems."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Having read the article quite closely, actually, I don't think he had an agenda. I just think he did it backwards. He took his SUSE 9 system and looked at what versions of MySQL and GCC it had. Then he built GCC for the OS X machine, then used that to build MySQL. He probably felt really good about that being a fair test, too! After all, the software was the same on all machines!
He'd have done better to use OS X Server with the shipped MySQL, of course, as your source points out. Apple's platform isn't fully mainstream for either GCC or MySQL, and it's hardly unfair to allow Apple's own tweaks to these packages to be used in the test. It's still a pretty real-world test he's doing, so it's not like it can be cheated.
Maybe it was deliberate bias, but I try not to suspect evil when simple incompetence can explain it.
You win again, gravity!
Dell dropped WebObjects and went with ASP because, as the site grew in popularity, they needed more developers and ASP knowledge was far more prevalent than WebObjects. I know this from my tenure at Dell in 1998. The move to ASP.NET was an evolutionary one.
EOF
Sorry, I didn't read past this.
Here's the truth: the article should read "Apple gives away $699 software package with every copy of OS X Server!"
You can buy WebObjects from the Apple store just like always, and
just as it's been for some time. The only new thing is that the developer tools are free ( for OS X ) and the entire package is free ( for new OS X Server purchases ). Now it only costs money ( exluding developer time, of course ) to develop and deploy WebObjects if you want to do so entirely on Windows 2000, or if you want to avoid buying an XServe. This is actually a brilliant move by Apple, although it is one likely triggered in part by low sales due to increased competition from J2EE, LAMP, andNote to parent: do your research before jumping to conclusions and making false claims, it helps prevent you from looking silly. I know. I've learned this the hard way myself...