“Twenty years after it was first released to the public, Apple has finally confirmed that its WebObjects Java-based web application framework is dead — at least as far as official Apple updates are concerned,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac.
“Back in the 1990s it was considered a breakthrough product, was one that Steve Jobs was incredibly high on, and officially came over to Apple as part of the historic deal to acquire Jobs’ former company NeXT,” Dormehl reports. “Even today, aspects of WebObjects are used to power its online Apple Store and iTunes Store.”
WebObjects is a discontinued product and will never be upgraded. – Apple representative
“To be fair, WebObjects was pretty much dead in everything but name. It was last updated for devs in 2008, the year after the iPhone shipped, and in 2009 Apple stopped including WebObjects with the Mac OS X Server,” Dormehl reports. “But just like yesterday’s article about the wrongly-maligned Newton MessagePad, WebObjects still has its devotees — who keep the word alive through a developer community called the WOCommunity Association.”
Read more, and see Steve Jobs presenting WebObjects in 1996, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
SEE ALSO:
Apple releases WebObjects Update 5.4.3 for Mac OS X 10.5 – September 16, 2008
Apple releases WebObjects 5.2 – November 12, 2002
WebObjects is obsolete. And that’s a good thing. It was powerful in its day and unnecessary now.
WO still can do everything, but its architecture is too powerful to be speed/scalability-optimized, I hear.
There wasn’t enough WebObjects adoption to keep Apple interested, at least from my POV. Its demise parallels that of the separate installation version of Mac OS X Server. Same story. Also a problem: WebObjects was, ahem, revised to be programmable using Java only. I guess that made some people happy at the time, but then Oracle took over Java and ruined it forever, turning Java toxic, again, from my POV.