> And you have to know nothing about HTML to use WebObjects.
How well did that work out in practice? Did WebObjects make heavy use of server-side in-memory sessions (which would require sticky sessions in a modern load-balanced setup)? Could it do things like registering event handlers to let you submit data back to the server or even go to another part of the app without having to know about URLs and HTML forms?
IIRC, WebObjects had an application called WebObjects Builder that was essentially a WYSIWYG HTML editor that was the web equivalent of Cocoa's Interface Builder. You'd drag & drop UI elements and hook them up to data objects, which would generate Java classes in the background.
Cappuccino [1] is a port of Objective-C to Objective-J (plus transpiler to JS) combined with a port of the Cocoa Frameworks for building client side "desktop class" web apps. You can use interface builder in XCode to layout your UI graphically.
I attended a NeXT WebObjects demo/training session in Toronto in late 1996, or early 1997. It was quite impressive for its time, but the licensing cost was absolutely ridiculous. They overpriced it such that by the time you were done with an Oracle or whatever license, only a Very Large Corp would be interested in using it, so they inevitably missed the wave of .com companies getting themselves out there. Per server or per-core licensing of some kind I believe, too.
They dropped the price ($50,000 to $499), but frankly it was the Apple acquisition (or the NeXT takeover of Apple if you prefer) that really ended it. All the enterprise related stuff withered on the vine.
The price drop was after the merger, in fact. They started bundling it with Server for free some time after that too, but I think the sun had mostly set by then already if I'm not mistaken.
The price drop was quite significantly after the merger. I am not sure of the timeline but it probably wasn't until 2000 or so. And by that time J2EE had taken the market it would have had.
My main problem was when Apple bought NeXT we really were left in the lurch and support was just impossible to get. Plus, canceling NeXTSTEP / OpenStep long before OS X was ready was not a fun thing. I often wonder if Apple had bought Be what NeXT would have become. I'm pretty sure Apple would have gone down in flames.
Hard to say. But likely NeXT would have gone down in flames continuing with pursuit of the 'enterprise' path it was on. Probably Sun would have bought their assets, for far less than what Apple paid.
Apple, well, they were in an awkward extended transition from 68k to PowerPC and from MacOS classic to something new. I actually think they could have made a go of some of the internal OS projects they had, with sufficient discipline, instead of going and buying something new. I'm not convinced that buying NeXTstep put them ahead on anything. It took 5 years to ship OS X, I have to think that in that time I'm sure they could have finished Copeland and shipped it, too? I personally don't fully actually believe the line that buying NeXT saved them.
What saved them was Jobs & crew pared down the product line, laying off a crapload of staff, switching to Dell-style just-in-time delivery, and rolling out the coloured iMacs (which was a big success). Hard to say how much of that was Jobs/Ives or whether Apple without Jobs could have done the same?
Jobs killed some good stuff from the old Apple. Newton, Copeland, OpenDoc, for example.
I actually think NeXT would have continued. They did make money and Sun was all Java'ed up given their stepping out of the whole OpenStep thing. Plus, Pixar did extremely well, and I don't think Jobs minded running both.
Copeland in my mind had no chance of shipping. It just was just another step in the Pink -> Taligent saga. I loved the Newton but it was flawed in direction from the start (even loved NewtonScript and Soups). OpenDoc was not very fun to program, but others probably know better (I was more a visitor in those days, I'm not an Apple fan, I'm a NeXT fan who had to immigrate). I would have bought a Newton-based desktop or laptop from them though.
Be would have brought back Jean-Louis Gassée which probably would have been a bad thing.
Apple Enterprise kept on keeping on for a bit after the takeover. If there were companies willing to pay (anything) for such a transitional technology, they would have made a deal.
They pretty much stopped responding to e-mail and phone calls in 1997, so maybe it was still going for Wall Street, but it was pretty hard on everyone else.
The Dell store? I thought that Microsoft funded a conversion to ASP because they didn't want a top-tier Windows reseller running their web store on Unix.
Enterprise and Italian business suits[1] require a bit more formality than a consumer company.
1) I learned from an article about Mr. Jobs at the time that I would never be able to wear and Italian cut business suit. The weird things Business Week once included in their articles.
The biggest problem is that we aren't allowed (political bs) use the open source fork so can't use things like a shared session :(