Bombax: OS X Web Development Platform | Hacker News Reader

Bombax: OS X Web Development Platform

bombaxtic.com

10 pointsbensummers20 comments

Bizarre! I guess it could be tempting for long time Cocoa developers who don't already know Rails or PHP? Though if they're building a basic website, rudimentary PHP would be less hassle, and if they're building a web app and want familiar territory, Cappuccino would be a better choice.

The trend in web apps is to do more of the work client side through Javascript (see GWT, SproutCore and Cappuccino) so a new server side framework seems a bit late to the party.

Performance as a result of compiled code seems to be the only real selling point, and in my experience, server-side code performance is not a widespread problem...

I don't begrudge someone hacking together something new for the fun of it, but this comes across as a real company trying to make a profit.

Who's going to actually use this?

I have a lot of time for Objective-C and Cocoa for desktop and mobile development. I'd go so far as to say it's a huge factor in the success of the Mac and iPhone platforms. It's pretty unique in supporting AOT, compiled-to-native executables while offering dynamic language and runtime features.

However the reasons it works so well for those purposes (low memory footprint, fast application startup time) don't seem very relevant for server development - and the downsides (#1 being the ability of coding mistakes to corrupt memory and/or abort the process) become huge liabilities for a server. So my guess is that this framework is going to come out on the wrong side of any cost/benefit analysis.

Everyone's correctly assuming that using this for hosting a public service on the internet would be an awful idea.

But if you have a desktop Mac or iPhone app that needs a localhosted web interface or HTTP API, this approach could easily be way better than dealing with a second language runtime.

Probably true. There's one or two other tiny embedded Objective-C web server designed for that purpose out there.

We've got just such an app, but we're running our backend process in JavaScript.

Web apps in Objective C --- the second-least safe programming language on the market. Oh please, oh please, build your next huge application in this. College tuition for my kids is freaking me out.

Why is Objective-C so unsafe? From what little I know about it, I see no reason why it should be less safe than, say, Smalltalk.

If Objective-C is the second-least safe language, what is the least safe language?

Smalltalk is garbage-collected. ObjC deals in raw memory addresses. It's actually less secure than C, as I see it.

This doesn't affect your point, since ObjC does still deal in raw memory addresses, but it has supported garbage-collection since Objective-C 2.0 (i.e since Leopard/10.5)

Yeah, I need a better term for high-level-language than "garbage collected" (I do some Cocoa dev in my spare time, and I do like being able to ignore reference counting. Oh! Reference counting! Another security weakness with Cocoa.)

Not sure how you reach the less secure than C conclusion, unless your claim is that the Cocoa frameworks specifically have a lot of security holes.

Not so much Cocoa's code quality as the worst-of-both-worlds situation it's in with exposure to crappy C code and a very dynamic runtime that is basically impossible to lock down ASLR and W^X-style.

The guy on the picture is using a PC!

Stock photos strike again...

If they wanted an Objective-C web framework it seems like they would have been better off improving GNUstep Web. From looking at the site I don't see what makes this special other than using Cocoa. It might have some compelling features that GNUstep Web doesn't, but they don't make it easy to find out what they are.

Running on Mac OS X with the newer, shinier ObjC 2.0 runtime is greatly preferred to running on GNUstep. Not to mention GCD or Core Data (GNUstep Core Data is primitive in comparison. Not to mention, you know, basically a dead project).

Of course, I'm more likely to just use Ruby or Cappuccino if I need to make something more complicated than a basic website. But I can see the appeal in this sort of framework.

Running on Mac OS X is a pretty tough sell, though. Ultimately, it's far more expensive than comparable servers running Linux or even Windows. Most of this is that there aren't many people offering OS X based server solutions, but even if you're willing to run your own hardware, Xserves are on the expensive side of things.

Compiled code? Persisting Data: TBD? I think I'll stick to Rails for now. This does sound like an interesting piece of software, though.

I would love for people to write their web apps using this framework, then pay me to pentest them.

Why? What makes this framework better to do penetration testing on than other frameworks?

It is written in Objective-C, which is not a type-safe language.

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