frothkit - Objective-C Web Application Framework | Hacker News Reader

frothkit - Objective-C Web Application Framework

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38 pointseluos23 comments

If I was to develop some web framework in Objective-C I will at least try to mimic the WebObjects framework which has some great concept behind it. The main grief against WebObjects that should be avoided is that the framework layer to access the database aka EOF (Enterprise Objects Framework) was never designed to use a connection pool nor work nicely in a multi-threaded environment.

Sadly Apple stopped the development of that web solutions years ago and kept it for itself... I heard from various folks at Apple that there are still a few engineers improving it and it is being used a lot for iTunes. WebObjects got some bad reputation from many people that have no clue on how it works and citing that WebObjects can't even support database update and this why the Apple Online Store is often offline when Apple release a new product. This is total BS of course, since take the iTunes AppStore which serve the content for all stores: music, apps, books, movies, etc... And you barely see that iTunes Store is offline.

WebObjects was a great technology but Apple decided to keep it for itself.

Well, the other issues with WebObjects is that at this point it is no longer Objective-C, but Java...

What are some examples of things that WebObjects did right? Are there still published docs for it?

You can still find many documentation online, a quick search on Google show a lot of results. There is a community of developer too with some docs/tutorial. Here is an overview: http://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/documentation/Overview-W...

It hasn't kept it for itself, it is still submitting patches and releasing new versions. The toolchain is no longer supported, but Apple also provides patches to the open-source toolchain.

Lots, lots more at http://www.wocommunity.org/page/default but as others have said -- this is essentially a (very nice) Java framework with some Eclipse tool support.

What I really miss is the Objective-C framework, with EOF, and native Mac tools, bindings etc.

Looks like this hasn't been updated since 2010, and it's website doesn't load. Also the underlying Cocoa port looks like it hasn't been updated since 2008.

I think we need a totally new Objective-C framework for web development based on newer design patterns, GCD, etc, but it needs a new port of Foundation and Cocoa to Linux and other systems.

As much as I'd love an Objective-C web framework, I wouldn't use one that only ran on Mac OS, pretty useless in terms of production hosting I think.

Agreed that if there was a modern WebObjects it should support GCD, and be at least available on Linux too. WebObjects back in the days was running on 4 different platforms: OpenStep, Windows NT, Solaris and HP-UX. so clearly the runtime was cross platform and it was relying only on the Foundation framework at runtime. None of the Cocoa framework was needed to deploy such app.

Apple moved away from different binaries per platform by switching everything to Java which solve the portability question, and additionally solved the database connectivity issues since by bring a java solution any JDBC driver available to talk to a DB will work with WebObjects.

Overall the move to java was a good move, but Apple stopped the investment in the software that NeXT created and went back to focus on desktop and devices... But they kept WebObjects internally for their own benefits I think.

Wasn't Cocoa available for exactly those four platforms as well?

No Cocoa was not available on those platform. OpenStep was running on NeXT OS, and was available from NeXT on the Windows platform. NeXT and Sun worked on getting OpenStep running on Solaris but Sun did drop the ball and switched direction by going with Java. OpenStep was never available on HP-UX, only WebObjects and PDO were truly cross platform before the switch to Java. PDO=Portable Distributed Objects which was an alternative to Corba back when Corba was such a big trends.

Odd, Apple lists patches for OpenStep on both Solaris and HP-UX: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA45376?viewlocale=en_US

I think the Apple doc is slightly inaccurate: the OpenStep part which include a graphic user interface was not available on HP-UX but the non graphic part: WebObjects, Enterprise Objects Framework, and Portable Distributed Objects was available. Looks like Wikipedia has avoid history of OpenStep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

Searching around, I find quite a lot of pages that mention NeXT's implementation of the OpenStep API for HP-UX, but none that mention that it's only the non-GUI parts. Are you sure?

Not entirely related (though I think someone actually is working on a web framework for it): ObjFW [1][2] is an Objective-C framework and runtime that provides Cocoa-like classes and methods, but with more open-sourceness and portability. It even runs on Raspberry Pi!

[1]: https://webkeks.org/objfw/

[2]: https://github.com/Midar/objfw (Mirror)

Recently added support for Haiku, too.

Midar doesn't slack around when it comes to portability. :)

RoutingHTTPServer[1] is nice lightweight library on top of CocoaHTTPServer[2], which behaves a little like Sinatra.

[1]: https://github.com/mattstevens/RoutingHTTPServer

[2]: https://github.com/robbiehanson/CocoaHTTPServer

Seems to be inactive. It hasn’t been worked on since June 2010.

Since we're doing this: http://webappkit.org

And of course Objective-J: http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/objective-j-tutorial.p...

dunno man, congrats i guess? the web part of anything currently to me is nothing but sophisticated text processing.

frothkit looks wrong, reminds me a bit of asp.net.

I've never heard of WebObjects either.

You might be too young. Webobjects were all the rage amongst hipsters in the second part of the 90s. I was eighteen and worried about that, fortunately C-shell, ASP, Perl and PHP came to save us.

You could use apple script instead of perl for CGI scripts

You can, but it somehow manages to be even worse than ordinary apple script.

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