WebObjects Now Free With Tiger 296
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."
Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:1, Interesting)
Deployment license, development license, or both (Score:3, Interesting)
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:OK, I gotta say it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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....
Prelude to OpenSource? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe there's a reason it's free. (Score:3, Interesting)
all i want for christmas is an xcode php debugger. (Score:5, Interesting)
COMPLETELY Misses the Point!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, WebObjects is now free to develop under Tiger and free to deploy under Tiger server. But the real story is that Apple no longer offers licenses to deploy WebObjects on any other platform - at any price. Probably 99% of existing WebObjects deployments are on non-Apple boxes. Goodbye, WebObjects!
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.
Re:all i want for christmas is an xcode php debugg (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Disney and TIAA-CREF (Score:2, Interesting)
At my last job, I used WebObjects for some of our web apps. I thought it did a great job and especially like using EOModeler. One app was supposed to use data from our other apps. So the app had to talk to 4 database, 3 of which belonged to other apps in the company. We made EOModels for each of our database connections. In our main EOModel, we had a couple objects that were connected to objects in the other models. Above the EOModel, EOF totally hid that fact that I was talking to multiple databases and assembling all the object relations for me. Granted I didn all this against an Oracle database, but when the Apple Reps we pitching the IDE to us they connected an Oracle db and an Access db to prove it didn't matter where your data was.
Re:WebObjects ahead of its time (Score:3, Interesting)
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 do and perhaps you misread the article.
You should re-read the following quote from the article:
"The company released WebObjects deployment software for free with Xserves (as part of the Mac OS X Server package) in June 2002, but the move to a wider distribution is regarded as significant - not least because until May 2000 the software cost $50,000."
Personally, I am totally psyched about this. Enterprise Objects, and the whole WebObjects environment in general are so way ahead of other similar technologies out there it is actually kind of ridiculous.
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 the non-math majors out there. There is no way this apple development machine comes in anywhere near your $499 price point - not with the processor it sports.
Re:Disney and TIAA-CREF (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:No need to apologize. Fridays happen! (Score:3, Interesting)
I never deployed WO apps on J2EE containers, but I remember reading on the dev lists that it was kind of troublesome because then you had to take care of all the threading stuff (something you don't have to do if you use WOMonitor an a bunch of instances). All that manual locking and unlocking of the editing contexts... does it even scale well with such bottlenecks? besides, I think a WO app on a J2EE container can't even take advantage of container-managed datasources, can it? I stopped using it on 2002/2003 so maybe the newer versions have it now...
Anyway, I hope they open source WebObjects. wotonomy is just not advancing, we don't have the time for it.
Link to the story (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:license risk (Score:3, Interesting)
There is some confusion here. They didn't "Change the terms". What they did was LOWER THE PRICE.
It used to be you paid $699 for a box with the development environement in it, a test-deployment license, and a full deployment license. You could deploy it anywhere.
Now you pay $0 for the development system, and $499 for a copy of OSX Server for deployment.
So, if you had 4 Mac Server, before your cost was $2,800-- for 4 copies of WebObjects.
Now your cost is
So, for that situation, they lowered the price by almost $3,000.
Even if you're not using OS X Server, you have always had to buy deployment licenses, and that was $699 with the WO retail box.
Now they have basically bunded WebObjects with their client OS for FREE, and with their server OS for FREE, reducing the additional cost of WebObjects to Zero.
How is this bad again?
As to deployment on non-Mac machines, you have *always* needed a deployment license to do that, and that cost $699 before. I think its pretty safe to say that once they get this adjustment to the business model worked out, it won't cost more than $699 to deploy WO apps on non-Mac hardware.
And they may well just open source the whole thing.
Any way you cut it, this is a price cut. Yes, their support for non-mac hardware is lagging, but that's not uncommon with WO...and generally WO deployed apps stay on the old version for awhile after the new version comes out-- its not like there are a lot of commercial WO apps out there that are just waiting for 5.3.
As to open source alternatives, there are none. There are some WO developers working on essentially a replacement in open source, and that may be a great project ultimately.
But most open source methods for doing web applications pale when compared to web objects. Its unfortunate there are so many thousands of Java and Open source devleopers out there creating inferior projects and spending more time to do it, when all they need to do is use WO and have a better solution quicker.
WO is really fantastic, and its really under-estimated, and not well understood in the general community. Apple lowered the price and made the model simpler before, and all they've done here is do the same thing again.
Its not unreasonable for Apple to charge money for WebObjects-- its one hell of a great solution, and is currently unmatched in the market place, free or proprietary. For what it does, its a total bargain.