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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Who else remembers when they re-implemented the (at the time version of) the Foundation framework in Java for WebObjects? That was, what, 1998? Right around when NeXT got re-absorbed by Apple, not sure if the rewrite was started before or after.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WebObjects/Overview/Objective-...

Those were the days! Actually kind of amazing that the Foundation framework is the result of steady evolution of an ObjC framework written by NeXT... over 30 years ago? All those `NS` prefixes that are still hanging on are for `NextStep`.

If this really replaces the ObjC implementation... would that be the final sunset of the codebase that has been there (at least ship of theseus style) from NeXTStep days? I wonder if there's continuous version control history of Foundation source from the start, and how many, if any, lines of code remain from the initial implementation.

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Foundation was developed for the needs of EOF so it makes sense there was a version for the Java WebObjects. There's almost certainly NeXT-derived code in macOS/iOS with a longer pedigree and a bunch of it will probably outlast the Foundation rewrite. As software evolution goes, it's an astonishingly long run, no doubt. Especially for a technology that very nearly went extinct.

Huh, Foundation was developed for EOF? (Enterprise Object Framework; it was actually very much like Rails ActiveRecord). I did not realize that, I always figured it came first.

I don't have a better reference than 'stuff I heard from people who worked on EOF'. The EOF Wikipedia page puts like this:

EOF 1.0 was the first product released by NeXT using the Foundation Kit

One way or the other, their development was closely connected/overlapping.

There were already many Rails like frameworks when it came to be, I never understood the hype, specially since I was part of one written in TCL back in 1999, whose core team went on to create OutSystems in 2001.

The "scaffold" demo really drove the hype.

WebObjects is actually still alive and kicking, but only inside of Apple

A lot of the web services that Apple provides still use that implementation of Foundation :)

From the day I realised that, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by how many things have come from Next or were derived from it. I find it quite astounding.

I thought it was NeXTSTEP/Sun, but it seems disputed. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-...

What they collaborated was in Distributed Objects Everywhere, which ended up becoming Java EE.

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

Their collaboration is also one of the reasons why Java is basically Objective-C semantics with C++ like syntax.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

Interfaces (protocols), dynamic class loading (plugins), RMI (distributed objects), jars (bundles), dynamic dispatch by default, object root class,...

And I guess Cocoa (the initially Objective-C based application framework for macOS) was kind of a wordplay on Java again.

It’s like Java, just sweeter ;)

During OS X early days, Apple wasn't sure that the Mac OS developer community groomed on Object Pascal and C++, was that keen into embracing Objective-C.

So they jumped into the Java hype, created their own JVM implementation, with Swing extensions for the OS X UI, and Cocoa Bridge was born for Objective-C interop, with bindings for all key Apple techonologies like Quicktime and such.

When it became clear that Objective-C wasn't going to be an adoption problem, instead of using a 3rd party owned language, they dropped support for Java and eventually gave their implementation to OpenJDK.

What happened to WebObjects? And why did Apple left the business market?

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