WebObjects, anyone?

[Stephen Huey]

This is not a plug, and I thought about posting this in the MacOS section, but even though this promising technology is owned by Apple, it's apparently not at all limited to the MacOS platform (you can deploy on Linux and Win 2000 as well).

In a nutshell, I first stumbled upon WebObjects today when a cool company I'm interested in says they like for developers to use this. I browsed it through and through and joined the mailing list, and people on there apparently pity traditional EJB developers and the like because this platform provides extensive rapid application development tools and a development model that looks like a simplied yet powerful alternative to EJBs and the like. That's about all I know...oh yeah, and that while you can deploy on Linux and Windows easily enough, it's much harder to develop on those rather than MacOS X.

This sounds great. I'm just wondering if any JavaRanch folks actually know much more about this (e.g. whether it's worth it to pick up an iBook off of eBay to play around with this stuff enough to convince the folks at work to start developing projects with this platform).

Thanks for your three or four cents...

[Matt Raible]

FWIW, Tapestry is a Java web framework that has borrowed many of its ideas and architecture from WebObjects.

[Stephen Huey]

Sorry if I'm wasting your time by probing on this minor point, but would you say that Tapestry has improved the model somewhat, or can you really not say that?

[Chuck Hill]

Hi Stephen,

I'll be presenting on the book Practical WebObjects here next week and will be pleased to go into more detail then. In the meantime...

people on there apparently pity traditional EJB developers

I have nightmares about being forced to get a job using EJB!

while you can deploy on Linux and Windows easily enough, it's much harder to develop on those rather than MacOS X.

That is not quite correct. There are two tools (the GUI builder and the object modeler) that only run on Windows and OSX. Mac users hate me for saying this, but I have both and Mac and a Win2K machine and I prefer the Win2K machine for most WO development. It is faster and has a larger monitor. There is a plugin for Eclipse for WebObjects and development on Windows is great. The plugin works on OS X too, but, well, I like my Windows machine. Deployment is supported on Win2K, OSX, Solaris, and some flavors of Linux. Note the "supported". In practice, if there is a JVM it will deploy. You can also deploy inside of JRun, JBoss, Tomcat etc.

This sounds great. I'm just wondering if any JavaRanch folks actually know much more about this (e.g. whether it's worth it to pick up an iBook off of eBay to play around with this stuff enough to convince the folks at work to start developing projects with this platform).

I don't know that I would go with an iBook, but yes, it is worth looking into. You will find many other projects in various languages that are based heavily on WebObjects. Do you know of any re-implementations of EJB in other languages?

Chuck