Apple WebObjects 5 - Manual (Page 13)

WebObjects 5 continues a proud, longstanding heritage of industry-leading web technology.
From predecessors that helped give birth to the World Wide Web to the current Java-based
release, WebObjects has become ever more powerful, comprehensive, and sophisticated.
Born at NeXT
WebObjects has its roots in NEXTSTEP, the award-winning object-oriented development tools
used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the original web browser at CERN. NEXTSTEP employed
a number of powerful design patterns that greatly simplified the creation of rich, graphical
applications. This ease of use led to its adoption by a number of large enterprises that wanted
to rapidly create sophisticated database applications.
To better serve this market, NeXT created a technology known as Enterprise Objects, the first
commercially successful object-relational modeling framework. Because Enterprise Objects
abstracted away all the work of database access, it quickly became the technology of choice for
financial institutions creating sophisticated client/server applications.
In 1995, NeXT realized that the World Wide Web would soon become the dominant format
for client/server applications. Therefore, NeXT programmers applied that same object-oriented
knowhow to create a sophisticated set of frameworks for managing HTTP requests and HTML
generation. In January 1996, NeXT announced WebObjects 1.0, the world’s first object-oriented
web application server. The power of WebObjects, leveraging the strengths of Enterprise
Objects, quickly made it the dominant product in NeXT’s portfolio.
Joining Apple
In 1997, NeXT was acquired by Apple, primarily for its engineering talent and the UNIX-based
operating system technology that eventually became the core of Mac OS X. WebObjects played
a key role at Apple during this time, driving Apple’s public Internet efforts such as the Apple
Store and iTools. However, WebObjects as a product was sold only through the Apple Enterprise
Software (AES) group, which also provided training, consulting, and support services for it.
This combination of direct sales and a high price (up to $50,000 for a multi-CPU deployment
license) kept WebObjects out of the reach of the vast majority of Apple developers.
Last year, after Mac OS X was solidly under way, Apple decided it was time to make both
WebObjects and AES more relevant to the broader Apple marketplace. At the WorldWide
Developers Conference in May 2000, Apple announced that it was cutting the price of
WebObjects to only $699 for a single box containing both developer tools and a full deploy-
ment license, which would be sold via both the Apple Store and traditional retail channels.
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WebObjects Background