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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger

Posted by Zonk on from the good-things-for-your-stocking dept.

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."

5 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. link to Apple's page by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.apple.com/webobjects/

  2. Free if you buy a MacOS X Server! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. by roard · · Score: 5, Informative
    WebObjects was (and still is) one of the most powerful web application system. Much more sensible than a lot of stuff :-)

    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 :-)

  4. Disney and TIAA-CREF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Disney uses WebObjects for booking vacations to Disneyland, Disneyworld and Disneycruise. See this URL I just pulled from their site:

    http://dlr.reservations.disney.go.com/cgi-bin/WebO bjects/TravelDLIBC.woa/

    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/ IndvGate?Request=CustomerInquiry

    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!

  5. Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. by hchaput · · Score: 5, Funny
    WebObjects was (and still is) one of the most powerful web application system. Much more sensible than a lot of stuff :-)

    EOF

    Sorry, I didn't read past this.