Talk:WebObjects

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[edit] Well-known sites

Howabout "Well-known Sites Using WebObjects" as a title here, rather than just Sites Using WebObjects, which might make it a target for link-spam? When ITMS store, google, or yahoo uses something, that tells us how well it scales, but when used for joe's jewellery page, we might want to justify what that tells us about WebObjects... Ojw 16:06, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

I have changed the title of the section, but the decision of what warrants inclusion as "Well Known" I will leave to wiser folk Daj9 15:51, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
None showed up so I did it instead. I looked up the Alexa rank of everything there as of now (21:08, 29 September 2005 (UTC)) and ordered them thus:
It seems to me that the obvious divide is between 38404 (funny.com) and 185254 (greatergood.com), so I've removed all of them below there, alphasorted the rest, and left a comment at the end of the list requesting that people keep it alphabetical and only list sites with alexa <50,000. — mendel ☎ 21:08, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PR-speak

What's with the Apple PR-speak scattered throughout the article? "Since then, it has attained a level of maturity unrivalled by its competitors and has powered some of the most innovative Web applications for major corporations such as Disney, Dell Computer and the BBC." ... What? "Unrivaled" by its competitors? "Most innovative"? There are other examples of this sort of strangeness scattered throughout the article, too. Elepsis 12:53, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Agreed- far too much PR-speak. Should be edited. ianbetteridge 28 Sept 2005.

Yes, I've now changed the 2nd par as per your suggestions. Also included a reference to the declining profile and popularity of WebObjects to balance any hint of postive bias. I feel this has improved the paragraph generally, so thanks for pointing it out! Although, just for the record, the previous claims I'd written can in fact be backed up...
"it has attained a level of maturity unrivalled by its competitors" - given it was the FIRST tool of its kind it stands to reason that it is more mature than its rivals.
"has powered some of the most innovative Web applications" - WebObjects was used to pioneer a totally new, Web-based business model of computer retailing for Dell; powered the first BBC News site (one of the world's leading news organisations) and, finally, with the iTunes Music Store it could be argued that WebObjects played a major part in the huge popularity of legal music downloading.
Nonetheless I agree that previous versions were in danger of "appearing" biased. ;-) Therefore I've made appropriate changes. Grahamstewart 1 Oct 2005

[edit] That's a strange kind of "free".

The infobox says that WebObjects is free (gratis), but you can't obtain it without buying a product from Apple. That it's bundled with other commercial software doesn't make it free any more than Excel is free because it comes with Word when you buy Office, or Windows Media Player is free because it comes with Windows. I've changed it to "Proprietary", which seems to be the Template:Infobox_Software standard for commercial software. — mendel ☎ 20:56, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Not true. It can be downloaded from the Apple developer site without any purchase necessary (you do have to register and sign a licence agreement though). Geira (talk) 19:15, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
Good call -- it's proprietary. Ojw 23:25, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Hi, I wrote most of the original article. The issue about whether it's free or not is a difficult one. I would agree that the license should be listed as "proprietary" as the product is not open-source and its use is subject to Apple's End-User License Agreement.

However in other parts of the article I do not see how you can argue that WebObjects is not free?! Certainly the developer tools are free as they're part of Xcode, and Xcode is very much a free download from Apple's Developer Connection website. You are not required to own Mac OS X in order to acquire the software (I agree that deployment is different as you must actually purchase Mac OS X Server or the Xserve to get your hands on the software).

The analogy drawn with Excel (see above) doesn't apply here. Excel isn't free because it's bundled with a paid-for product. WebObjects, however, IS free (for the developer tools at least) because you DO NOT have to pay anything to acquire them.

I antipate some will argue: "Well what use is WebObjects to anyone without Mac hardware or the operating system?" However I don't actually think that's relevant in assessing whether a product is free or not. If you were to acquire a promotional CD or DVD that might be handed out to you, would we really argue that it wasn't actually free because it requires the ownership of a CD or DVD player to be useful?

I'm keen to argue the point further before making changes to article. Grahamstewart 16:40, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

My apologies -- I misunderstood XCode's provenance. I thought it was a component of, and distributed only with, OS X (because I saw that Apple called it an OS X "feature") and made the changes based on that understanding. — mendel ☎ 17:41, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
Looks like the article still needs some tweaks as it indicates that WebObjects is an integral part of Mac OS X, and deployment does not have to be on a Mac. What Grahamstewart says above is quite different - that the dev tools and framework is a part of the free-of-charge XCode, but a deployment license is part of Mac OS X Server ( not Mac OS X) . My changes today merely eliminated the ambiguous word 'free' - but did not fully correct the situation, as I do not know how, in 2007, these licenses are issued. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 00:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hroðulf (talk • contribs)

As of WebObjects 5.4, Apple has eliminated the requirement (and deprecated the support methods) for WebObjects license keys. It provides unlimited development and deployment right out of the box. This change has been made in the article. Macserv 20:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] No disadvantages section?

Is this the only wikipedia advertisement with an "advantages" section with no corresponding "disadvantages" paragraph? It should at least mention that most of the websites built with WebObjects (Apple store, etc.) are dismally bad. Ojw 23:25, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I agree there should be a disadvantages section, however your opinion that most of the sites built with WebObjects are dismally bad is just that: an opinion. Even then, you have to ask whether the poor quality you perceive is as a result of shortcomings in the WebObjects technology itself, or is it down to poor user programming? I think any disadvantages section would need to be based on sound technical argument. Grahamstewart 16:40, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
For example, on the Apple Store you can't bookmark a page, email a link, or publish a link to any part of the website, because it doesn't use meaningful URLs but temporary ones which are associated with a particular session and disappear soon after they were created.
This behaviour seems to be so common that you can actually identify websites that were built with WebObjects by observing that your bookmarks don't work, or when you click a link on a web-page that you loaded 20 minutes ago and it tells you that your session has expired and refuses to serve the requested page.
I haven't used the tool (so can't comment on whether it's just coincidence that all its users have made the same mistake) but it's probably more than just an opinion. Ojw 20:18, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
I think that's more just one of the canonical mistakes of web development; how to handle sessions expiring gracefully. If you came up to me and asked me what language that happens in, I'd say PHP, others would list others, and so on. And while people run into problems in the Apple Store, they run into a lot fewer problems at BBC News or The Hunger Site, so it's difficult to tell if Apple's store programs written in WebObjects have problems, or if Apple's store programs are as best as you can get in WebObjects. (It would be similarly absurd to criticize C++ because an unreliable application was written in C, but perfectly reasonable to report that some authority has criticized some aspect of C++'s design.)
In other words, there's certainly room for a criticisms section, but it would have to be reporting others' verifiable criticism of WebObjects; Wikipedia can't publish original research. — mendel ☎ 20:49, 29 September 2005 (UTC)
WebObjects provides mechanisms supporting bookmarkable pages (e.g., the Direct Actions feature and various framework methods that can be overridden to change the default session time-out behavior or navigation behavior) and sites can be readily designed to make pages widely bookmarkable when that is the developer's intent. Whatever the Apple Store design, ready support for bookmarking has been a WebObjects staple for years. As a tool intended for Enterprise applications first and foremost, the default behavior tends to enforce a session workflow and provide some rudimentary security throw flow control. Commerce and reference sites rely more heavily on bookmarking (until you decide to checkout). WebObjects is not special in this regard, these same issues appear in many other web application architectures. --Kcarlin 20:58, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm trying to figure out why there doesn't seem to be a lot of people actually using WebObjects - it's got to have some disadvantages. A friend mentioned that it's almost impossible to find hosting companies that do WebObjects. Anybody got any information on this, or data on the popularity of WebObjects as a dev environment?

Actually, as a Webobjects developer back in 99-01 I can confess to it's primary sin; it was an ugly orphan. Foreign to program (not necessarily bad - just different), elusive to maintain (e.g. I dare you to go onto dice.com and search for Webobjects developers), and just plain non-standard. For that reason, I personally moved on to .NET and Java (where at least I could get a job). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 76.103.29.172 (talk) 02:04, August 24, 2007 (UTC)
The primary disadvantages of WebObjects have, for many years, been its dependence on a Mac for development, (and even for deployment in some versions), and the cost and hassle of licensing. Both of these drawbacks have been eliminated. For development, WebObjects applications (as well as WebObjects itself) are now built using Eclipse and WOLips, which run anywhere Java runs. Deployment used to be expensive and difficult due to licensing. This is no longer the case: as of WO 5.4, licensing has been removed, providing unlimited deployment out of the box. Hosting companies that offer WO should be asked to eliminate any surcharge, since it's no different than other engines from their perspective. Macserv 20:04, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Added NPOV tag, can't believe no one did before — still, correct me if I'm wrong, though. Haydn (talk) 08:00, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cayenne vs. EOF: "un-insert"

It is unclear to me that the following statement has much merit:

However, it does allow developers to un-insert objects from contexts (a feature often missed in EOF).

The delete operation in EOF prior to saveChanges seems to provide the desired functionality. Is there a citation for this issue? Kcarlin 22:19, 22 October 2005 (UTC)


[edit] WebObjects history claim

Perhaps a nit -- WebObjects was not, as this entry claims, "..the world's first object-oriented Web application server." Credit for that development goes to WebRex which was shipped originally in early 1995 - about a year before WebObjects. I can't find the original press release online, though here is one announcing an update:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.announce/tree/browse_frm/month/1995-10/a0f82528d86525be?rnum=11&_done=%2Fgroup%2Fcomp.sys.next.announce%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1995-10%3F#doc_ae2e9a4a33bce335

The company that developed WebRex is now defunct -- IT Solutions of Chicago, IL.

I'd edit the entry myself but as I was the CEO of the company, I guess that would be a violation of Wikipedia's usage guidelines.... :-)

75.42.129.102 18:29, 29 January 2007 (UTC) Ted Shelton tshelton@afterink.com


So... How does someone get a person writing this entry to respond to a request for a correction??

thanks

Ted Shelton

66.92.180.250 21:03, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mystic meg predicts - whats with present tense assertions being made regarding October 2008 - the future!

The tools section starts off with a sentence "As of October 2008 most WebObjects architects and engineers are using the " I had to double check that my sleep depravation wasn't making me dellusional, this is still only April 2008 isn't it? October being about 6 months away or so?? Endastorey (talk) 19:50, 28 April 2008 (UTC) Endastorey

I have removed the "October". I would guess that the originator of the text meant "October 2007" or something like that, but since these "as of" comments are mainly used to indicate when the text was written and therefore the time at which something changeable was actually true, I have simply removed the "October" part since, as of 2008, it is true that WebObjects software is usually developed with open source tools, i.e. Eclipse and WOLips. This has been the recommended development platform since at least 2004, when Practical WebObjects (ISBN 1-59059-296-4) recommended it above all other options. 216.94.11.2 (talk) 21:42, 5 May 2008 (UTC)