Comment by flomo
12 hours ago
All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.
I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.
WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.
Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere
If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.
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