Can someone please explain the point of something like this? it's so verbose.
1) you've got a lot of spare time on your hands and wanted to test your skills and show your love for a language. Based on the outlandish hello world example (which is useless for most web developers), this is most likely.
2) you had some ridiculous constraints and really absolutely had to build a web sever in objective-c. In this case, a better use case or example would be appreciated.
4) You find that the very small amount of spare time this sort of thing takes is worth it, even if just for kicks.
5) You miss WebObjects.
6) In addition to having code commonality, you might be interested in performance that allows you to not have to worry about scaling out for much much longer than other common solutions (or requiring rewrites if you're successful). For example, my own embedded Objective-C web lib (based on libmicrohttp) clocks in at around 30K requests/second even when initialized via script on my laptop, whereas something like Sinatra does around 900.
http://blog.metaobject.com/2012/03/30k-requests-aka-wrk-is-f...
http://blog.metaobject.com/2011/12/ruby-and-rails-scalabilit...
7) You think textual verbosity is a good thing when it adds to readability.
8) You want to embed a web-server in your iOS and/or MacOS X app. Peer to peer, like the Internet was originally intended. While it may be possible to achieve with RoR or Sinatra or the like, an ObjC lib is just less hassle.
FTFY :)
In other words: there was a WebObjects after v4? ;-)
Here's the first web app to be written using it: https://github.com/fjolnir/experience-tranquility
As for verbosity -- Objective-C stylistically tends to be a little more verbose than other languages (named arguments, no abbreviations, verb-object structured method names). It doesn't need to be but it tends to be as a matter of tradition.
That said, for what it's doing (setting up a web server with 3 different responses and error handling), this is not particularly verbose.
This means my customers needn't download a special app on their desktops and I don't need to write them.