WebObjects

» see developer.apple.com/webobjects as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

webobjects was the apple piece of the late-nineties java web stack i kept reading about and never touched. by the time i was in engineering school in ankara around '03 the enterprise java world i was learning ran on sun and ibm gear. webobjects was the apple-shaped corner of that map. i knew it ran the apple store the way i knew solaris ran banks, more by reputation than experience.

next shipped webobjects in march 1996 at fifty thousand dollars a license, which is the price i remember seeing in old next catalogs years later and not believing. it was an objective-c framework with a visual builder and a database adapter underneath, the whole stack for shipping a server app at a time when "server app" meant cgi scripts. apple bought next in december 1996, mostly for nextstep and steve jobs, and inherited webobjects as a side effect.

the move to java came with version 5.0 in may 2001, a full rewrite that left the objective-c original behind. apple cut the price to free with mac os x tiger developer tools around 2005. the final binary release was 5.4.3 on 15 september 2008. by then it powered the apple store and the itunes music store backends, and parts of the wwdc live broadcast tooling.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

apple stopped issuing new releases outside apple in 2009 and the silence stretched on. for six or seven years webobjects existed in a strange state where the apple internal teams kept patching it for the apple store and itunes backend, while the external world watched the version number freeze. the project wonder open source community kept the public side alive with patches and extensions, and one annual conference that ended in 2013.

on 13 may 2016 an apple executive relations contact replied to a developer named hugi thordarson with the line "webobjects is a discontinued product and will never be upgraded". thordarson had been writing to tim cook for years asking the simple question. that reply was the death certificate.

~ the long tail ~

the apple store finally migrated off webobjects to a more modern stack in the early 2010s. the itunes store stayed on a hybrid for longer. project wonder kept the framework usable for the small number of shops still running production webobjects in europe and latin america in the late 2010s. by 2026 you can still pull the source down and build it. there is just nobody being paid to fix the next bug.

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