frothkit - Objective-C Web Application Framework

frothkit - Objective-C Web Application Framework(code.google.com)

38 points by eluos 13 years ago | 23 comments

yoda_sl 13 years ago |

If I was to develop some web framework in Objective-C I will at least try to mimic the WebObjects framework which has some great concept behind it. The main grief against WebObjects that should be avoided is that the framework layer to access the database aka EOF (Enterprise Objects Framework) was never designed to use a connection pool nor work nicely in a multi-threaded environment.

Sadly Apple stopped the development of that web solutions years ago and kept it for itself... I heard from various folks at Apple that there are still a few engineers improving it and it is being used a lot for iTunes. WebObjects got some bad reputation from many people that have no clue on how it works and citing that WebObjects can't even support database update and this why the Apple Online Store is often offline when Apple release a new product. This is total BS of course, since take the iTunes AppStore which serve the content for all stores: music, apps, books, movies, etc... And you barely see that iTunes Store is offline.

WebObjects was a great technology but Apple decided to keep it for itself.

marbletiles 13 years ago | |

It hasn't kept it for itself, it is still submitting patches and releasing new versions. The toolchain is no longer supported, but Apple also provides patches to the open-source toolchain.

Lots, lots more at http://www.wocommunity.org/page/default but as others have said -- this is essentially a (very nice) Java framework with some Eclipse tool support.

What I really miss is the Objective-C framework, with EOF, and native Mac tools, bindings etc.

mpweiher 13 years ago | |

Well, the other issues with WebObjects is that at this point it is no longer Objective-C, but Java...

macrael 13 years ago | |

What are some examples of things that WebObjects did right? Are there still published docs for it?

yoda_sl 13 years ago | | |

You can still find many documentation online, a quick search on Google show a lot of results. There is a community of developer too with some docs/tutorial. Here is an overview: http://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/documentation/Overview-W...

danpalmer 13 years ago |

Looks like this hasn't been updated since 2010, and it's website doesn't load. Also the underlying Cocoa port looks like it hasn't been updated since 2008.

I think we need a totally new Objective-C framework for web development based on newer design patterns, GCD, etc, but it needs a new port of Foundation and Cocoa to Linux and other systems.

As much as I'd love an Objective-C web framework, I wouldn't use one that only ran on Mac OS, pretty useless in terms of production hosting I think.

yoda_sl 13 years ago | |

Agreed that if there was a modern WebObjects it should support GCD, and be at least available on Linux too. WebObjects back in the days was running on 4 different platforms: OpenStep, Windows NT, Solaris and HP-UX. so clearly the runtime was cross platform and it was relying only on the Foundation framework at runtime. None of the Cocoa framework was needed to deploy such app.

Apple moved away from different binaries per platform by switching everything to Java which solve the portability question, and additionally solved the database connectivity issues since by bring a java solution any JDBC driver available to talk to a DB will work with WebObjects.

Overall the move to java was a good move, but Apple stopped the investment in the software that NeXT created and went back to focus on desktop and devices... But they kept WebObjects internally for their own benefits I think.

mikeash 13 years ago | | |

Wasn't Cocoa available for exactly those four platforms as well?

jrajav 13 years ago |

Not entirely related (though I think someone actually is working on a web framework for it): ObjFW [1][2] is an Objective-C framework and runtime that provides Cocoa-like classes and methods, but with more open-sourceness and portability. It even runs on Raspberry Pi!

[1]: https://webkeks.org/objfw/

[2]: https://github.com/Midar/objfw (Mirror)

nglevin 13 years ago | |

Recently added support for Haiku, too.

Midar doesn't slack around when it comes to portability. :)

scraplab 13 years ago |

RoutingHTTPServer[1] is nice lightweight library on top of CocoaHTTPServer[2], which behaves a little like Sinatra.

[1]: https://github.com/mattstevens/RoutingHTTPServer

[2]: https://github.com/robbiehanson/CocoaHTTPServer

ddfreyne 13 years ago |

Seems to be inactive. It hasn’t been worked on since June 2010.

fyolnish 13 years ago |

Since we're doing this: http://webappkit.org

Samuel_Michon 13 years ago | |

And of course Objective-J: http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/objective-j-tutorial.p...

rjzzleep 13 years ago |

dunno man, congrats i guess? the web part of anything currently to me is nothing but sophisticated text processing.

frothkit looks wrong, reminds me a bit of asp.net.

yarrel 13 years ago |

I've never heard of WebObjects either.

tangue 13 years ago | |

You might be too young. Webobjects were all the rage amongst hipsters in the second part of the 90s. I was eighteen and worried about that, fortunately C-shell, ASP, Perl and PHP came to save us.

Irishsteve 13 years ago | | |

You could use apple script instead of perl for CGI scripts