Comment by wodev
11 years ago
WebObjects is still available and in use by a small but active circle today.
It moved from Objective-C to Java under Apple. Apple discontinued shipping it with OS X Server Snow Leopard, but the frameworks are still available/free. The community picked up where Apple left off with the open source Project WOnder.
It is a full stack development framework. Enterprise Objects Framework(EOF) is the ORM or Model layer like Cayenne or Hibernate. WebObject components are the front end View layer like you might get from Tapestry.
I have yet to find a web framework that rivals its Controller layer, DirectToWeb (D2W). D2W sits between the Model and the View. It can generate Views automatically using information from the model and with customizable direction from a rule system. It also provides controller actions with customizable callbacks.
Out of the box, WebObjects can reverse engineer your database, constructing a full model of it, and D2W can then construct a full blown Create/Read/Update/Delete interface to it with no coding required. If you don't have a database, you build a model and WebObjects can generate the SQL necessary to create the database for you as well.
It's still pretty amazing, despite being treated like an ugly step child by Apple. It still powers the billion dollar iTunes store as well AFAIK.
I was a WebObjects Developer for 2 years from 2007-2009, the company I worked for still uses it for their massive health-care-related web apps. It's a really cool framwork to use, as it incorporates so many aspects that are usually provided by different libraries.
The developer community is small, but very active. Every year they hold a "World of Web Objects (WOWO)" conference right around WWDC in San Fran.
Project Wonder has done amazing work to bring Ajax and many other "Web 2.0" features to WO.
It does still power the iTunes store, and the Apple Store. A friend of mine that worked at our sister company landed a job with Apple working on the iTunes store, and AFAIK, he's still there doing that today.
I used to work at Apple many years ago in a past life but IIRC:
Project Wonder was definitely at the core of iTunes Store. They had your typical monolithic web application and used most of the WebObjects technologies.
The Apple Store was different. They had dozens/hundreds of micro services which used WebObjects only in the front i.e. to handle request/response and routing. They may have even switched it out by now.
Interesting. I remember reading the Project Wonder mailing lists and the creators and maintainers of it were certain that Wonder wasn't being used by Apple for anything "public facing", but they strongly suggested it was used a lot internally.
I've always wanted to work for Apple... care to share any thoughts?
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Oracle Application Express can do something like reverse engineer a database and produce a full CRUD interface.
And it's perfectly, utterly awful.