Apple Developer System Status | Hacker News Reader

Apple Developer System Status

developer.apple.com

98 pointskroger67 comments

Here is a copy of the email I received:

We apologize for the significant inconvenience caused by our developer website downtime. We've been working around the clock to overhaul our developer systems, update our server software, and rebuild our entire database. While we complete the work to bring our systems back online, we want to share the latest with you.

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We'll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we've created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

If your program membership is set to expire during this period, it will be extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us.

Thank you for your continued patience.

What's interesting about this rebuild is it tell us Apple tightly couples it's services.

I would except at Apple's scale they would have followed a Service Oriented Architecture. This doesn't seem to be the case at all.

And whatever happened to static hosting for videos/downloads.

As of now right now (~1374712460) there are two systems that are online: iTunes Connect and Bug Reporter. And both seem to use the cannot-be-killed* WebObjects. You can clearly see that in the URLs as they mention "WebObjects" and end in ".woa" (assuming it means Web Objects Application).

*I've no idea what WebObjects are but I've heard people poke fun at their mention. Would be interesting if someone had more details to share.

Side Note: If you are looking to install Command Line Tools and seem to be unable to install Xcode from the App Store. You can go to Xcode > Preference and install it. Screen shot from a couple of minutes ago: http://i.imgur.com/KEhjkE3.png

WebObjects is a web application framework. It's OLD old. It's about ten years older than Ruby on Rails, putting it on par with PHP and Ruby itself. NeXT made it and Apple decided to make it free. It was Objective-C and is now Java.

Web Objects was amazing for its time. It actually utilized server-side image maps to make web pages responsive before JavaScript took off.

It's not any older than Interface Builder and other stuff in the Mac OS dev toolkit, as all of that came from NeXT. I would guess though that it has not been maintained or updated.

I used WO in the late nineties and it was way ahead of its time. Enterprise Objects (which morphed into Core Data) was an amazing tool for working with databases. Today it's pretty obsolete and it's not easy to find people.

It's OLD old.

Steve Jobs used to hawk it on 486s while wearing ripped jeans. http://www.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/World/Steve%20Jobs...

I don't know about you, but I can't convert epoch time in my head and I don't know anyone who can. What's benefit is there to posting epoch time instead of in ISO 8601 format?

Yeah, I noticed the WebObjects apps were back quick and first. With all of the iOS 7 bugs filed and the App Store in active use, I'm not at all surprised that they are too big to die for the time being. As for the rest of it, my money is on some Ruby descendant, based solely on the fact that all of the Passbook sample code was Ruby based, with a Sinatra app being the server and a signing gem bundled. I think some of Mavericks server utilities are Ruby based, too.

Isn't the developer portal written in Java too, probably with a mix of frameworks for different components (it certainly had a heterogenous feel on the front end)? I seem to remember some of the signon urls had .woa in them, and one of the former Struts developers mentioned a vulnerability which sounds like a likely candidate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6081428

It'd be interesting to know after all this is over what the vulnerability was, though we'll probably never hear from Apple.

UNIX time, really?

WebObjects is kind of like Rails, but 20 years earlier. (Seriously, it's actually very similar to Rails, in it's bones. I don't know if dhh had seen WebObjects, or they just both had seen some smalltalk mvc framework)

They inherited it from NeXT, and it seriously was really ahead of it's time originally. Hell, it was a technically competent and competitive web framework through, oh, 2002 or 2004, maybe even a few years after that. (Can you tell I used to develop for it?)

But it ended up not being a market Apple wanted to be in, selling a web development framework, and it didn't get much attention, it withered on the vine. (Even if it had... 20 years of legacy is not good for a web framework, it would probably still suck by now -- and who wants a proprietary rather than open source web framework, if they can avoid it?). But they kept using it internally anyway long after they stopped marketting it or selling it externally.

Anyhow, it's really hilarious if the legacy WebObjects part of Apple's web infrastructure are actually the parts that are still up. Hilarious in a pleasant way for those of us who used to use and love WebObjects back in the day.

Yes - this would be another feather in the cap for the old NeXT engineers (and I suppose the folks who have worked to update it since...)

That _could_ be a prime example of security by obscurity. Who would spend time looking for a WebObjects exploit if you can spend that time looking for a Rails exploit?

Someone who wants to post youtube videos on hacking apple developer accounts?

As one example, WebObjects powered the BBC News Online site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News_Online) at launch in 1997.

I was brought in as a contractor in the last few months, so I didn't get much of an overview, but I wrote template code (each page, and each component of a page, had three associated files: .wos for 'scripting', .html for templating, and .wod for 'declarations' to tie the other two together).

It was streets ahead of anything I'd previously used (mainly PHP code with intermingled HTML), and led me to build my next major project using XSLT to provide some insulation between the logic and presentation.

Ughhh. Just noticed that I can't install the XCode Command Line Tools because the dev center is down... no stdio.h on my system. What is this, the dark ages!? :)

temporary workaround: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

I seem to remember you could just Brew Install this and in fact that's what prompted Apple to provide an official standalone gcc de-bundled from XCode.

Unfortunately, it seems to be the future.

Just like everything, the price of having an all knowing central authority must be paid somewhere sometime.

This has nothing to do with an "all knowing central authority." This only affects people selling or developing using Apple's tools or distibution. Turning this into George Orwell borders on ridiculous. When AWS goes down, which is far more frequent than the Apple Dev center, are you still making tin foil hat assumptions, despite the fact that AWS outages affect a significant portion of the web, while the dev center means that we can't download a particular tool to build an App that obstensibly makes us money. If the freeway gets shut down because of an accident, I don't think we equate that with a totalitarian plot.

If I subscribed to Art Bell/Coast to Coast theories of the world, I'd be far more concerned about Google (and Facebook) than Apple. Google's product is you, sold to advertisers. Apple's product is primarily hardware. Apple has no financial incentive to know everything about you because that data doesn't really help them sell more stuff, if it does, it's marginal. While with Google, the more they know, the more they can then sell that information in the form of targeted advertising. Remember, Google is the one that wants(ed) to store health records. They store every single search query, indexed by IP, and if you're logged into to Gmail, to your name and every email you've ever sent. I don't hate Google or Apple, but to bring up some dystopian future because a dev center is down?

Maybe you're overinterpreting the parent commenter, who makes a valid point. I read it as: This reminds us of our (increasing?) dependence on systems operated by opaque and fragile entities that, on top of it all, may have goals at odds with our own.

In 1993, you were almost certainly going to have to pay money to write software on or for Mac OS. In 2013, you most certainly do not have to pay money on or for Mac OS X.

Xcode is free-as-in-beer. You can install this if you want to avoid Apple's tooling: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

Ruby, Python, Perl and other interpreters come standard with OS X. As does a terminal. Things are better, not worse.

>In 2013, you most certainly do not have to pay money on or for Mac OS X.

You have to join the Apple Developer Program, which costs $99/year, in order to distribute software that will run on OS X with default Gatekeeper settings. The registration for that program is currently down.

Which is Apple's prerogative. I can't speak for the average user, but given the number of times that, say, Transmission has been downloaded solely through MacUpdate and CNET (1.5mm), it seems pretty clear that many users know how to turn Gatekeeper off.

Running unsigned apps on 10.8 requires doing one of three things:

1. Using a browser other than Safari

2. Holding Option while opening the dmg

3. Changing the Gatekeeper settings

In practice #1 means that many people never even notice Gatekeeper.

I use Chrome and I still have to bypass Gatekeeper when opening some apps for the first time.

You agreed to this...

You know there's a well known and simple solution...

YOu could always...

You know what, I know you know better, but perhaps you'd be interested in forfeiting your rights for a bit of convenience? Great!

I love pseudo-haikus wrapped in dystopian drama.

I hate when no amount of evidence and history will keep ostrich-types from calling you a crazy conspiracist. I guess we won't understand until food delivery is dependent on iPhone Apps.

FWIW I highly recommend the Dominos iOS app (the food notsomuch). Don't even have to give your email unless you want to pay by cc.

As for the Orwellian drama, most people aren't looking to be footsoldiers in the crusade. They develop for Apple because it puts steak on the gd dinner table and if developing for Firefox OS did the same they'd be doing that too but as of it today it doesn't.

You can. I've just done it without hitch.

I installed them yesterday just fine on a new machine. Weird.

I successfully installed the XCode command line tools on a new machine yesterday via the Preferences dialog box in XCode. The web installation route is definitely unavailable, but the Preferences route appears to continue to work.

If you don't yet have XCode though... out of luck? Man, I'm glad I bought and setup my new mac two weeks ago, and not one week ago.

Xcode 4 is available on the App Store.

Is it no longer shipped on the install DVD?

There are no longer any install DVD's for most macs, which don't come with optical drives anymore.

Well, the Bug Reporter is now online; that's one system restored, 13 to go. At least they're making progress.

https://bugreport.apple.com/

we should file a bug report that the dev center is down. That would be metafun.

EDIT: (I forgot to use the <sarc> tag.) Apologies all.

No. They're already busy. Let's not bother them.

Bug reporter has never been offline through the recent outage. That's not progress, that's just things not getting even worse.

This is getting really frustrating - I'm waiting for several clients now in order to update profiles with new device info, and can't do so because the Apple service is offline, so no new betas for those clients. Most of their online services are not critical - things like online documentation and forums are really unimportant to me as a developer (that's what SO is for), but certification and adding device ids has the potential to sabotage a lot of their developers' schedules if this lasts much longer.

An outage of a few days is understandable to me if they're trying to do a security audit and update their systems, but an outage of a week?

For a large company like this with huge resources that just smacks of incompetence. They should be able to reproduce their systems on completely new hardware and up to date system software and frameworks within a day, surely? Does anyone know or care to speculate as to why this might take them so long?

I'm guessing they're doing a re-write.

That would be truly insane, I refuse to believe that's the case!

My best hypothesis is that they've upgraded all their software/frameworks which haven't been updated in 6 months, and have found a boatload of bugs related to running the old code on the updated software. I can't think why else they'd be doing that would take so long, and I sincerely hope there is no significant rewriting going on.

Better than nothing and that's what we had before...nothing.

Glad that they have this page now

I created a Ruby gem/command line tool that pulls the ADC status page and returns a pretty output:

https://github.com/imkmf/adc

Apple created a status page to show the recovery progress.

I see iTunes Connect is still up. Does that mean that apps can still be submitted, assuming you all ready have the needed provisioning and certs?

Yes, I updated an app today and submitted it without any issue.

IC is a much older application. I wish they would rewrite it though because it sucks bigtime.

I submitted an app 1 week ago. This morning a received an e-mail stating the approval process is delayed. No other details.

Does anyone know when the current iOS beta expires? If they don't get it together by then, going to be a lot of sad eager adopters...

A month from now, or so.

The OTA update to beta 3 from previous betas still works, so pushing beta 4 via that probably wouldn't be an issue.

But you can downgrade an iOS 7 device to iOS 6 using iTunes, so I even if iOS 7 did expire, it's not the end of the world.

Also, developers are told that they should not install iOS 7 on a mission critical device, and should only use it on a development device.

Still no timescale for getting anything back up…

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