WebObjects
WebObjects is an application server development environment. It was originally designed at NeXT Computer, but came over to Apple Computer when Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Steve Jobs became CEO of Apple. The latest version of WebObjects as of March 2004 is 5.2.3. Apple sells WebObjects 5.2 for $699, which includes a development and deployment license.
WebObjects basically consists of two parts. The first, the Enterprise Objects Framework or EOF, communicates with relational databases and turns database rows into an object graph. The other layer, the WebObjects Framework, uses a template-based approach to take that object graph and turn it into HTML, or other tag-based information display standards, such as XML or SMIL.
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OpenSource alternatives
With the move of WebObjects from Objective-C (last version WO 4.5.1) to Java (first version WO 5.0), people's interest grew in OpenSource alternatives to WebObjects which kept using the Objective-C language. The two frameworks available are SOPE which is used as the basis for the OpenGroupware.org groupware server since about eight years, and GNUstep-web, which is part of the GNUstep project.