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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jun 17, 2005 07:16 AM
from the good-things-for-your-stocking dept.
from the good-things-for-your-stocking dept.
Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store."
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OK, I gotta say it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OK, I gotta say it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OK, I gotta say it (Score:3, Funny)
Prelude to OpenSource? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Prelude to OpenSource? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
link to Apple's page (Score:5, Informative)
Deployment license, development license, or both (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Deployment license, development license, or bot (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Deployment license, development license, or bot (Score:5, Informative)
The news seems to boil down to this:
a) WebObjects Development (not deployment) is included in XCode and therefore free.
b) WebObjects Deployment is included for free with Tiger Server.
c) Other licences aren't available any longer. So that means, that you'll have to buy MacOS Tiger Server to get a valid licence. Deployment on all other platforms isn't supported any longer (it should work, cause it's java only, but there's no guarantee).
If Apple doen't change its mind on point c, this news is not good news
Bye egghat.
Parent
Damn it! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Damn it! (Score:3, Funny)
Free if you buy a MacOS X Server! (Score:5, Interesting)
While Apple did give you free WebObjects 5.3 Development on every XCode 2.1, you have to buy a MacOS X Tiger Server to run the applications. Yes, you can still build a WAR file to deploy the application on Tomcat/JBoss/Jetty [darcynorman.net] but you still need the server license to deploy your applications.
The old way (pay $699usd, you get development environment on Mac and Windows, plus deployment on any JVM):
You can deploy WebObjects 5.0 to 5.2.4 applications on any Windows, Linux [tetlabors.de], Solaris, MacOS X and even FreeBSD [tetlabors.de] with a compliant JVM. In short, WebObjects 5.0 - 5.2.4, you spent $699 usd to buy from Apple (I bought my copy $88 usd from eBay. Apple used to has student developer discount for $99 usd).
The New Way ("Free development license, but $$$$ on each deployment license from Tiger server):
Enough said, starting from 5.3, you've to buy the license for each deployment license.
Anyway I'm pissed because I like to write apps on my Powerbook, and deploy the apps to my Debian Linux server running Apache with mod_webobjects adaptor. I would never switch to a Apple machine running Tiger Server.
Look I love WebObjects... with all the Direct To Web and the EOF goodies, it runs circles around Ruby on Rails and the EJB/JDO toys... but I felt being sold by Apple this time.
-cocoa ninja
Re:Free if you buy a MacOS X Server! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Apple is somewhat ambivalent about how to deploy. We know that Apple personnel read Slashdot - perhaps someone from Apple will explain whether we can actually deploy with a .WAR package on a platform besides Mac OS X Sever.
WebObjects used to be authored in Objective-C. WO developers were very happy. Then Apple decided that Java would be the Next Great Thing and removed Objective-C support and transitioned to Java - causing a great number of previous WO sites and developers to give up the toolkit.
Of course, one of the major reasons to port WO to Java was to use it in an enterprise environment. Now Apple wants us only to deploy on X server, somewhat breaking the point of the entire Java transition. Ah well....
Parent
Re:Free if you buy a MacOS X Server! (Score:3, Interesting)
WebObjects used to cost $699 (for one deployment, or one developer seat), but is now free. It was already free with Mac OS X Server (starting June 2002 according to the article).
I'm betting they just removed the chunk of code having to do with entering licenses.
Maybe you are right, but if your only source of info is the linked article, then you know as little as I
What For? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What For? (Score:3, Funny)
WebObjects is Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
Nice introduction to WebObjects (Score:4, Informative)
all i want for christmas is an xcode php debugger. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:all i want for christmas is an xcode php debugg (Score:3, Interesting)
Disney and TIAA-CREF (Score:5, Informative)
http://dlr.reservations.disney.go.com/cgi-bin/Web
TIAA-CREF, an institutional and individual investment house has over 200+ WebObjects applications still in productcion. Here's another live URL:
https://ais2.tiaa-cref.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects.exe
Those are just a few of the "small" companies using WebObjects
I've been developing in J2EE for over 3 years now (WebObjects before that) and I can say that nothing beats EOF. Entity EJBs are still way too slow of a technology to get up and running. The change notification and delegation that is present in the EOF framework stack is so powerful and the level of caching that's given to the developer are way too easy. Hibernate, CMP EJBs and JDO don't compare. Note that Apple was actually on the JDO specification board. I'm not sure if they voted for or against JDO but it was interesting to see they were on the board. Maybe there were thoughts creating a specification around EOF? HAHAHA!
Re:Disney and TIAA-CREF (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of you are confused - it's not "just Java" (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, the USPS uses WebObjects for a number of systems. I sure love their new "automated postal systems."
Old Wired magazine cover story (Score:3, Interesting)
Love him or hate him, he does have an eye on the future most times.
Be aware that I'm answering this whilst drunk (Score:3, Interesting)
A few tools go some way towards recreating the success of parts of WebObjects - I've not played with Hibernate but hear it's a good. We use Cayenne, which is better in many respects (no addToBothSidesOfRelationshipWithKey - the default setters do this), although there are some bugs in the latest major release (1.1). Still, Andrus has really improved on some of the weak points of EO, and it's nice to see some people taking some pride in the interface with more recent releases of Cayenne - after fifteen years Apple (who pride themselves on their interfaces) still don't be able get the interface for EO to a point where it's acceptable. Focus doesn't work properly - there are mandatory fields hidden in strange places. And it's made awkward to work outside of the standard toolkit. All this is stupid. Stupid!
Some of the templating systems are comparable to the WOBuilder. The WOBuilder has some bugs in it, and there are templating systems around that are more powerful. Nevertheless, having now used Tapestry and the wo templating system I can see advantages to the less powerful WO system. It doesn't scale to seriously complicated pages as well as tapestry, and really is a lot less powerful, but for simple pages it's a lot quicker to make magic happen. That'll be OK for us, we're planning to hack tapestry to allow us to store the quivalent of a wod file within a single tapestry tag.
In the past, I've worked with some top notch people who develop on WebObjects. One of them is just the quintisenial guru programmer. He can look at a problem, sit down and start typing, and have a working product out in a tenth the time it would take me to produce an equivalent. Another guy is a perl guru. He's recreated the entire WebObjects development system in pure perl and moved the platform to linux. We do all our WO development on linux using text editor of choise (mostly emacs but I'm a bim type of guy) and the java libraries on linux. I have a mac laptop and had the privilege of porting them to BSD
Apple disappoints me. Releasing webobjects with the OS is a good idea, but they're not doing it to maek WebObjects the next best thing, they're just looking for an exit. The wasted opportunities are so disappointing, and the history of WebObjects is ridden with them. WebObjects is the best of breed and has been as long as it's been out. I'd love to know how the original team conceived it. Did they hire a team of people who'd worked on a web-like thin client system for unix or VMS? It has that feel about it that says that the people who pieced it together had a really good grasp of the problem they were trying to solve, and they did it near the beginning of the web application era. Don't take away the impression that WebObjects is some sort of golden hammer - it's quirky as hell. For example, instead of using List or evven Vector, every time you use a list by default you need to use a java implementation of NSArray. All the NS objects are default, and it's blatant that this is a quick port of Next's objective-C system to java. This is offputting at first as are all the other annoying interface quirks, stupidly long methods names and strange things that go wrong without meaningful explanation when you accidentally leave a colon sitting at the bottom of a wod file (binding file between the temaplted html file and java view file) but - it really is a mile ahead of all competition. Yet1 Apple have kept it on the backburner. They haven't dedicated de
This is a desperate last-effort move from Apple (Score:3, Funny)
These 4th millenium technologies are going to squish everything else that is even remotely related to the internet and Apple is intelligent enough to know this. Just like everybody who reads slashdot.
It's a shame. First Longhorn anounces it's upcoming search technology and now this. It's all downhill from here on, Apple.
RIP. It was nice with you.
Re:Apple learns fast? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Apple learns fast? (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus a $400 processor [newegg.com]. Maybe $30-50 for some kind of optical drive?
Would they take a loss on each machine at $499? Perhaps a little, but it would be small.
small? wtf? Ok, so I go to dell to try and find the cheapest 3.6GHz Pentium 4 machine and I see that dimensions don't support anything near that, so the precision 380 line which starts at $649 has an option for $580 to upgrade to a 3.6GHz processor. That's $1229 for t
Re:free as in ??? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:free as in ??? (Parent is mis-modded) (Score:3, Informative)
As of now WebObjects developer is free. Your can develop with only a copy of Apples free dev tools. Now Deploying requires a License of 10.4 Server which will put you back $499 ($299 if your educational). This dev kit you talk about was the Tiger quick start kit, to allow developers to get tiger early. Apple's Dev Tool have been free from the start. Stop spreading FUD.
In other new the rumblings around WWDC was that Apple is planning on open sourcing WebObjects, which would then make it free. More on t
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Database (Score:5, Funny)
Well, here's what the WebObjects home page has this to say on the subject:
"..extends your reach by ensuring flexible, maintainable design... build or use standards-based web services.. enable code-free generation, configuration and testing... standards-based web services... opening up enterprise development
Having read that, I can quite confidently say that I have NFI.
Parent
Re:Database (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the short answer is yes.
It uses JDBC database connectivity and OS X Server ships with MySQL installed.
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like saying because somebody's first attempt at website that uses JSPs and Tomcat is slow and clunkly must mean that J2EE is a broken architecture.
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:5, Informative)
EOF -- an object relational mapper, providing isolation from the database and from the database model -- in particular is very, very nice. Not the final answer to everything, but still quite cool :-)
The sad thing with Apple's current WebObjects is that it's only java (it's even a J2EE environment), while originally (at NeXT) it was Objective-C based (plus WebScript, an ObjC-like script language). They dropped the Objective-C bit with WebObjects 5, sadly (4.5 had ObjC and Java). Well, ok, beeing a J2EE env has its own advantages, but still...
The documentation of WO 4.5 is here [apple.com], the documentation for the current WO is here [apple.com].
There is a free software implementation of WebObjects 4.5 from the GNUstep project [gnustep.org], GNUstepWeb [gnustepweb.org], which work well. OpenGroupware.org [opengroupware.org] also has its own WO 4.5 implementation, NGObjWeb, which works very well too (it's the foundation of SOPE [opengroupware.org]). I wrote an article [roard.com] showing how to do simple (html) components, but it's in french ;-)
Though, if you want to discover a really interesting project, have a look to Seaside [seaside.st]. It's inspired by WebObjects, with an excellent component model, but is even better (support of continuations, etc). And it's completely dynamic, letting you change things at runtime easily (Smalltalk rulez ;-). It's one of the best thing I know :-)
Parent
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:5, Funny)
EOF
Sorry, I didn't read past this.
Parent
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:5, Interesting)
And some of the best Web sites have been done using WebObjects, including the Apple Store (http://www.apple.com/store [apple.com]) and the entire infrastructure for iTunes. Don't blame the tool for lousy site workflow.
However, I would say that the people who program in WO tend to understand a great deal about software architecture and theoretical IT issues - but in truth, many WO programmers are former NeXT GUI programmers who always will look on the Web as a bastard UI.
WebObjects is a fantastic development environment, a hell of a lot nicer than JSP/J2EE, but requires substantially more training than the lamp stack.
Parent
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Says a lot about software pricing (Score:3, Insightful)
If you reach that point before the end of the product cycle, IMHO you've then over-charged
No it doesn't, first of all, if you were able to sell that software at that price (and made a profit) then you where charging what the market would sustain. If you didn't shift enough units, then you would have charged too little (or misjudged the need for the app in the first place). You also may have developed the software early and under-budget (hah) so whilst the perceived value of the product is still high,
Re:Says a lot about software pricing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:dell's website now runs .Net (Score:3, Informative)
Most Likely because WebObjects now only runs in OS X. Dell probably hasn't used WebObjects for about 7 years now, right about the time Apple bought Next. It was there original store that was coded in WebObjects.
Re:dell's website now runs .Net (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Informative)
JBoss has been used as the container since Panther shipped, or shortly thereafter.
WebObjects was one of the leading Application Servers (along with NetDynamics and Kiva) 3 or 4 years before J2EE even existed. Since the price went from $50K to free, it saw a fairly significant drop in market share. Sorta strange what a big price drop and drop in marketing will do... now BEA can plunder peoples pocketbooks instead.
Parent
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
AnandTech report flawed (Score:4, Interesting)
[Christian Kent] I was forwarded this today by a Macintosh MPEG software developer:
Okay, stop, I have to make an argument about why this article fails, before I explode. MySQL has a disgusting tendency to fork() at random moments, which is bad for performance essentially everywhere but Linux. OS X server includes a version of MySQL that doesn't have this issue.
No real arguments that Power Macs are somewhat behind the times on memory latency, but that's because they're still using PC3200 DDR1 memory from 2003. AMD/Intel chips use DDR2 or Rambus now ... this could be solved without switching CPUs.
The article also goes out of its way to get bad results for PPC. Why are they using an old version of GCC (3.3.x has no autovectorization, much worse performance on non-x86 platforms), then a brand spanking new version of mySQL (see above)? The floating point benchmark was particularly absurd: "The results are quite interesting. First of all, the gcc compiler isn't very good in vectorizing. With vectorizing, we mean generating SIMD (SSE, Altivec) code. From the numbers, it seems like gcc was only capable of using Altivec in one test, the third one. In this test, the G5 really shows superiority compared to the Opteron and especially the Xeons" In fact, gcc 3.3 is unable to generate AltiVec code ANYWHERE, except on x86 where they added a special SSE mode because x87 floating point is so miserable. This could have been discovered with about 5 minutes of Google research. It wouldn't had to have been discovered at all if they hadn't gone out of their way to use a compiler which is the non-default on OS X 10.4. Alarm bells should have been going off in the benchmarkers head when an AMD chips outperforms an Intel one by 3x, but, anyway ...
I hate to seem like I'm just blindly defending Apple here, but this article seems to have been written with an agenda. There's no way one guy could stuff this much stuff up. To claim there's something inherently wrong with OS X's ability to be a server is going against so much publicly available information it's not even funny. Notice Apple seems to have no trouble getting Apache to run with Linux-like performance.
Parent
Re:AnandTech report flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
He'd have done better to use OS X Server with the shipped MySQL, of course, as your source points out. Apple's platform isn't fully mainstream for either GCC or MySQL, and it's hardly unfair to allow Apple's own tweaks to these packages to be used in the test. It's still a pretty real-world test he's doing, so it's not like it can be cheated.
Maybe it was deliberate bias, but I try not to suspect evil when simple incompetence can explain it.
Parent
Re:WebObjects ahead of its time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:COMPLETELY Misses the Point!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but with the switch to the Intel Platform, perhaps Apple may let OS X Server run on servers made by different companies which in turn would come along with WebObjects. For example, Dell [slashdot.org], since he said that he would offer OS X to customers if Apple were so willing.
Also, if .Mac Homepages allow for WebObjects, then that would make it interesting. Buy a Mac, subscribe to .Mac, and not only do you have WebObjects, but the server to deploy your site from. And you use iSync to keep what you have online syn
Parent post is WRONG ! (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the truth: the article should read "Apple gives away $699 software package with every copy of OS X Server!"
You can buy WebObjects from the Apple store [apple.com] just like always, and
just as it's been for some time. The only new thing is that the developer tools are free ( for OS X ) and the entire package is free ( for new OS X Server purchases ). Now it only costs money ( exluding developer time, of course ) to develop and deploy WebObjects if you want to do so entirely on Windows 2000, or if you want to avoid buying an XServe. This is actually a brilliant move by Apple, although it is one likely triggered in part by low sales due to increased competition from J2EE, LAMP, andNote to parent: do your research before jumping to conclusions and making false claims, it helps prevent you from looking silly. I know. I've learned this the hard way myself...
Parent
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/ [apple.com]
Now what does that URL tell you?