I am not sure why this stuff is posted now, but as someone who still need to use WebObjects at work because of a legacy product, we use instead Project Wonder:<p><a href="https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder">https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder</a><p><a href="https://wiki.wocommunity.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wiki.wocommunity.org/</a><p>Because Wonder is more or less patched & maintained while WebObjects is in abandonware state since 2008 (and officially since 2016).
My second job was working for a small WebObjects consultancy in 2008. They developed bespoke line-of-business applications for small companies. Having the complete stack - from the HTML templating through to the ORM - provided by one vendor and designed to work together made development faster than anything I've worked with since.<p>It's a shame the cost was too high for too long, and even when Apple made it free, they never open sourced it.
WebObjects and Distributed Objects Everywhere, are two Objective-C projects that eventually influenced how JEE came to be, yet another connection between Java and its Objective-C influences.
Ah, WebObjects, one of the sad "dead ends" of web tech, not because of being technically obsolete, but because the world moved to different stacks…<p>I'd put ColdFusion, AolServer and Seaside in the same category.
Some say it is still better than today's Ruby Rails / Laravel in terms of productivity. And if it was open sourced at the time the world would have been very different.<p>All we know is, it's called WebObject.
Fun fact: WebObjects was the most expensive product Apple has ever sold, at $50000. It managed to keep NeXT alive after the hardware business collapsed
I worked at a university and we used WedObjects for a lot of project. I still believe that it could be around today and competing with the best "stacks" available. Limiting factors would be price and deployment options.<p>But alas, it wasn't viewed in the light by everyone and other "stacks" became more popular.
I wasn't even a programmer back in 2001, but flipping through this book shows how certain concepts endure, even as technology evolves. It's a bit like the snake eating its tail - even as we move on, we find ourselves revisiting tried approaches.
I was working on BBC News Online shortly before it launched in 1997. That was WebObjects-based, and it seemed really powerful and really nicely designed.