Talk:WebObjects

Howabout "Well-known Sites Using WebObjects" as a title here, rather than just Sites Using WebObjects, which might make it a target for link-spam? When ITMS store, google, or yahoo uses something, that tells us how well it scales, but when used for joe's jewellery page, we might want to justify what that tells us about WebObjects... Ojw 16:06, 2 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have changed the title of the section, but the decision of what warrants inclusion as "Well Known" I will leave to wiser folk Daj9 15:51, 24 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What's with the Apple PR-speak scattered throughout the article? "Since then, it has attained a level of maturity unrivalled by its competitors and has powered some of the most innovative Web applications for major corporations such as Disney, Dell Computer and the BBC." ... What? "Unrivaled" by its competitors? "Most innovative"? There are other examples of this sort of strangeness scattered throughout the article, too. Elepsis 12:53, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed- far too much PR-speak. Should be edited. ianbetteridge 28 Sept 2005.

That's a strange kind of "free".

The infobox says that WebObjects is free (gratis), but you can't obtain it without buying a product from Apple. That it's bundled with other commercial software doesn't make it free any more than Excel is free because it comes with Word when you buy Office, or Windows Media Player is free because it comes with Windows. I've changed it to "Proprietary", which seems to be the Template:Infobox_Software standard for commercial software. — File:Ontario trillium sig.pngmendel ☎ 20:56, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good call -- it's proprietary. Ojw 23:25, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I wrote most of the original article. The issue about whether it's free or not is a difficult one. I would agree that the license should be listed as "proprietary" as the product is not open-source and its use is subject to Apple's End-User License Agreement.

However in other parts of the article I do not see how you can argue that WebObjects is not free?! Certainly the developer tools are free as they're part of Xcode, and Xcode is very much a free download from Apple's Developer Connection website. You are not required to own Mac OS X in order to acquire the software (I agree that deployment is different as you must actually purchase Mac OS X Server or the Xserve to get your hands on the software).

The analogy drawn with Excel (see above) doesn't apply here. Excel isn't free because it's bundled with a paid-for product. WebObjects, however, IS free (for the developer tools at least) because you DO NOT have to pay anything to acquire them.

I antipate some will argue: "Well what use is WebObjects to anyone without Mac hardware or the operating system?" However I don't actually think that's relevant in assessing whether a product is free or not. If you were to acquire a promotional CD or DVD that might be handed out to you, would we really argue that it wasn't actually free because it requires the ownership of a CD or DVD player to be useful?

I'm keen to argue the point further before making changes to article. Grahamstewart 16:40, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies -- I misunderstood XCode's provenance. I thought it was a component of, and distributed only with, OS X (because I saw that Apple called it an OS X "feature") and made the changes based on that understanding. — File:Ontario trillium sig.pngmendel ☎ 17:41, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No disadvantages section?

Is this the only wikipedia advertisement with an "advantages" section with no corresponding "disadvantages" paragraph? It should at least mention that most of the websites built with WebObjects (Apple store, etc.) are dismally bad. Ojw 23:25, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree there should be a disadvantages section, however your opinion that most of the sites built with WebObjects are dismally bad is just that: an opinion. Even then, you have to ask whether the poor quality you perceive is as a result of shortcomings in the WebObjects technology itself, or is it down to poor user programming? I think any disadvantages section would need to be based on sound technical argument. Grahamstewart 16:40, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

For example, on the Apple Store you can't bookmark a page, email a link, or publish a link to any part of the website, because it doesn't use meaningful URLs but temporary ones which are associated with a particular session and disappear soon after they were created.

This behaviour seems to be so common that you can actually identify websites that were built with WebObjects by observing that your bookmarks don't work, or when you click a link on a web-page that you loaded 20 minutes ago and it tells you that your session has expired and refuses to serve the requested page.

I haven't used the tool (so can't comment on whether it's just coincidence that all its users have made the same mistake) but it's probably more than just an opinion. Ojw 20:18, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's more just one of the canonical mistakes of web development; how to handle sessions expiring gracefully. If you came up to me and asked me what language that happens in, I'd say PHP, others would list others, and so on. And while people run into problems in the Apple Store, they run into a lot fewer problems at BBC News or The Hunger Site, so it's difficult to tell if Apple's store programs written in WebObjects have problems, or if Apple's store programs are as best as you can get in WebObjects. (It would be similarly absurd to criticize C++ because an unreliable application was written in C, but perfectly reasonable to report that some authority has criticized some aspect of C++'s design.)

In other words, there's certainly room for a criticisms section, but it would have to be reporting others' verifiable criticism of WebObjects; Wikipedia can't publish original research. — File:Ontario trillium sig.pngmendel ☎ 20:49, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]