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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Did WebObjects live on?

I wonder if Apple could have positioned Mac OS X server to run that sort of thing

I was a dev when WebObjects was new and absolutely no one ever used it for anything serious. CGI was already the default standard for web servers by 1996 and by 2000 there was a raft of commerical products from Microsoft and Java-based systems that were adopted much more widely.

Instead of Stack Overflow, we had Matt's Script Archive

https://www.scriptarchive.com/

Dell’s online store would like to have a word.

not to mention the infrastructure behind itunes and the apple online store

(though i have met a few haters of wo here and there, i could never get a good reason why)

He mentions in the questions that WebObjects used CGI to connect to the web server. I’m sure it was used and I believe looking back at it it could have accelerated development of a system I was working on. One of the problems of the time was that it was hard to evaluate software. You had to go through a sales guy who would lie to you until you bought it. Then the engineers would discuss the limitations.

Its price tag probably prevented the average startup from using it. It’s hard to use expensive software before you have funding.

I was a WebOjects dev from 2007-2009, it was really neat to work with, and although I'd learned about "frameworks" in my Software Engineering degree, it never fully appreciated just how much of the work a framework does for you. So, so much different to just a "library" like everything else I've used before or since.

Apple still use WO internally for a lot of things (apple store, iTunes store), but I think it's slowly dying outside the company. The place I used to develop for slowly moved away from it, interestingly mostly because apple killed the XServe and so it got harder and harder to deploy.

WebObjects starting at version 5 was 100% java so it could run on any system running a Java VM, including Mac OS X. When Apple was selling Xserve then many Apple on Une services like iTunes, .Mac (ancestor of iCloud), Apple Online Store were running on WebObjects and Xserve thus on OS X server.

I've seen it in the URL when using App Store Connect, I'm curious as to what other services Apple uses WebObjects for.

That reminds me of "eBayISAPI.dll" still being in eBay URLs, but in that case I think it's fake and no longer actually hooked into some crusty old Microsoft stack.

I think the iTunes Store and its associated machinery (including App Store Connect) uses WebObjects.

I have no experience with it, but Apache Tapestry[0] is supposed to have some commonalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry

The Smalltalk web framework "Seaside" is inspired heavily by WebObjects

They dropped the price but converted it to Java for version 5. Java just isn't suited for anything based on Cocoa. They stopped development so it didn't transition into the JavaScript driven world.

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