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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> And you have to know nothing about HTML to use WebObjects.

How well did that work out in practice? Did WebObjects make heavy use of server-side in-memory sessions (which would require sticky sessions in a modern load-balanced setup)? Could it do things like registering event handlers to let you submit data back to the server or even go to another part of the app without having to know about URLs and HTML forms?

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IIRC, WebObjects had an application called WebObjects Builder that was essentially a WYSIWYG HTML editor that was the web equivalent of Cocoa's Interface Builder. You'd drag & drop UI elements and hook them up to data objects, which would generate Java classes in the background.

> which would generate Java classes in the background.

Initially it was Objective-C classes not Java.

Web Objects was later ported to Java and then it did generate Java classes.

I hate web dev, and I find myself wishing that there were a modern equivalent of what you've described. Is there one that doesn't suck?

Cappuccino [1] is a port of Objective-C to Objective-J (plus transpiler to JS) combined with a port of the Cocoa Frameworks for building client side "desktop class" web apps. You can use interface builder in XCode to layout your UI graphically.

[1] http://cappuccino-project.org

Vaadin [1] might be close, if you don't mind the JVM on the server side.

[1]: https://vaadin.com/introduction

+1. This is the closest thing to what OP described that I know of.

Search for relax/relax on GitHub. You'll love it.

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