Using Objective-C On The Server

http://blog.securemacprogramming.com/2012/03/using-objective-c-on-the-server/

by jrmg • 14 years ago

31 17 14 years ago

blog.securemacprogramming.com

Argorak2• 14 years ago

I had the "joy" to work on a pretty broken WebObjects project a few years ago. I also didn't enjoy the framework a lot back then. So, the open question:

Is there anything in WebObjects that makes it worth revisiting the framework?

gecko2• 14 years ago

WebObjects is, in many ways, two products: EOF4 and the web components. I'm going to separate them.

EOF4 was an absolutely insanely well-designed ORM that I absolutely still think has held up very well. EOF4 assumed, hey, you already have a relational schema! and hey, you like your objects to actually act like objects!, and rather than trying to shoehorn one into the other, EOF4 instead provided excellent tools so that you could specify how your database should be represented as objects. Other tools today still provide that (e.g., Hibernate), but EOF4 provided it in an extremely easy-to-use way that at once provided good abstractions, and the easy ability to dive under the covers when necessary.

WebObjects's web components, on the other hand? Probably not. Prior to widespread JavaScript, WebObjects made it extremely easy to write stateful websites without going crazy playing with sessions and the like. Nowadays, the right way to do that is to write a JavaScript application and call a bunch of REST endpoints--something doable in WebObjects, but needlessly complicated. Throw in Objective-C's memory model, and I don't really have any desire to work with WebObjects again.

If this project revives EOF4, and provides a cleanly RESTy way to use WebObjects, I think there could actually be a lot of value for companies that want to reuse their Cocoa models on the server. I don't think we're going to see a general renaissance of WebObjects, though.

Argorak2• 14 years ago

Thank you for the insight. I mostly used the frontend components and was already using proper frameworks handling sessions and alike, so this might be why I didn't enjoy it a lot.

binarycheese• 14 years ago

I don't think Objective-C was ever designed for large scale Enterprise projects.

gecko2• 14 years ago

Dell ran its entire business on the Objective-C version of WebObjects (4.5) for quite some time, until about 2000, if I recall correctly. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "large-scale enterprise", but I'd hope Dell at its heyday would qualify.

lobster_johnson• 14 years ago

Many parts of Apple's enterprise still runs on WebObjects, including the iTunes Store and the AppleID site: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aapple.com+inurl%3Aweb...

swalsh• 14 years ago

I often feel like IOS apps work well despite Objective-C, not because of it. The idea of someday having to maintain a server written in Objective-C scares me.

justinvoss• 14 years ago

iOS and Mac apps are a lot of fun to write and work with, for two reasons:

1) Objective-C is a pretty decent language. It's not perfect, it has some baggage, but overall it's pretty neat and has enough flexibility to build a good platform.

2) Apple has built two good platforms, in AppKit (Mac) and UIKit (iOS). These frameworks are the real secret sauce, not the language. They're comprehensive and generally well-built, and make working on Apple platforms a joy. They actually take advantage of the unique features of Obj-C.

If someone could produce a web framework of the same caliber as UIKit, I think Objective-C would make a great server-side language. But building such a framework is not easy.

kls• 14 years ago

I would second this, while I am sure there are many on here in which Objective-C fits the way they think, I personally would hate to have to use it for the server side of the equation. Apple and before that NeXT did a lot of work to make developing UI based system, with Objective-C easy. The efforts for anything on the other end of the pipe seem to be more developed out of necessity than inspiration. Cappuccino, which is external to Apple, and has created Objective-J (GWT for Objective-C) seems to have put more inspirational work into Objective-C for the server side, that being said, it's still not my thing, but I know others that have used it and love it.

equalarrow• 14 years ago

This is interesting; just last night I was looking for some obj-c web app frameworks. I spend most of my day working on iOS stuff and I thought why not play around with implementing some web services with obj-c?

While I tip the hat to the gsw folks, I always thought WebObjects was a horrible dev environment. It always seemed overly complicated and compared to where the web is now, to me it doesn't make any sense to use.

The closest thing I've found to 'usable' for making a dynamic site or api is frothkit: http://code.google.com/p/frothkit/ But, it needs Cocotron to work and I don't know if it works with the Lion Xcode.

Anyway, I think obj-c is totally legit for webapps that require speed. Maybe that magic framework will break through. However, I definitely do not think GSW is it, sorry.

Aqua_Geek• 14 years ago

I've thought about this a lot over the past few years. I think it'd be awesome to be able to compile your web app into a bundle that gets loaded by some Objective-C server.

That being said, I think the performance improvement would have to be substantial to get me to switch from a scripting language.

mrsteveman13• 14 years ago

That's exactly what I did (see other response), and it works pretty well for the most part. The bundle gives you both a nice container to deploy, along with the ability to pull assets out of it with a relative bundle path, just like on iOS/Mac.

Launchd works really well for keeping your server process running too, zero issues there.

The performance was really good, with the right libraries involved and some tuning you could have something really nice, but very few groups are focusing on it at the moment :\

mrsteveman13• 14 years ago

A few months ago I was making plans for what is now my home base website for App Store & other projects. I'd been working in obj-c for about 2 years both on the Mac and on iOS, but also had a fair bit of python experience with Django, App Engine, etc. I decided to give it a shot with obj-c.

I knew about the handful of "big" frameworks for handling this task with obj-c, but rejected them in favor of getting more hands-on experience building it, pushing myself and learning in the process. It was, of course, a personal project, something I alone was responsible for working with, so I decided it was OK if I experimented a little.

I went into the project knowing I would eventually have to port it to Python (and I did), but it was a lot of fun :)

I hand picked some lightweight libraries to handle specific parts of the server. One has to be cautious knowing that a library developer who thinks their sole target is a tiny cellphone, may not be worrying about things you will eventually have to worry about on a server.

I picked CocoaHTTPServer to handle requests and responses, and someone else had written a nicer "route" style interface for it which meant all of the possible responses to an http request were simply a series of blocks defined in a row, each with a regex or named parameter style URL route defined right there next to the code that would handle it. This works out to be quite a similar layout in code as something like Bottle/Python or Express/Node.js, both of which I've worked with now and I very much prefer this style.

I made good use of blocks & dispatch queues elsewhere as well, firing off an async block whenever I needed to pull new tweets from Twitter's api, or update Github repo stats (both are cached and displayed on the site).

I picked a Mustache template library and a Markdown parser library I found on Github for handling dynamic page generation & blog post syntax, respectively. Sqlite for storing anything that needed to be stored, Regexkit-lite for properly checking and handling anything that may be passed in to a url query or post body, etc.

I changed the Xcode project type to build me an executable binary that lived inside a bundle (Server.bundle) containing all the pages and assets the thing needed, so it could be deployed as a single "thing".

I also got Lion's sandboxing to work quite easily, which in theory would give some moderate protection against the entire server being compromised if someone managed to get an exploit to run inside the process.

Other than some CPU usage issues with the template library (easily solved by nginx caching pages), it all worked really, really well. I threw enough abuse at it, and did enough debugging that I was confident it would hold up well in production (which turned out to be wrong).

And then it came time to deploy somewhere, a problem I had been working on since day one, so i knew what i was getting in to.

There were only a few options: a cross-compiler framework like Cocotron (compile on Mac, run on Linux), one of the native *step libraries like GNUstep running on Linux or FreeBSD, or simply deploy on a Mac somewhere.

I tried all combinations other than Mac first, I built out a GNUstep environment with libobjc2 on FreeBSD, tried the cocotron->linux stuff, each time watching something blow up in my face due to my choice of components and my requirements.

While obj-c is cross platform, some of the libraries and features I chose to use were not. CocoaHTTPServer is built on top of CFNetwork, which is not part of any obj-c framework/library, but rather a lower level Apple C library only found on Macs. There's a "lite" open source version, but I quickly discovered that solving one issue like that would only bring up another. For instance, dispatch blocks will only work with GNUstep at the moment, and only when it is compiled with clang, against libobjc2, a combination few if any Linux distros actually ship in their repos.

Not a lot of people interested in deploying modern, dispatch/block-heavy, obj-c 2.0 code to Linux, not nearly as many as there are deploying such things to OS X or iOS.

So I decided why not just run on a Mac server somewhere? After all I can't solve every problem all at the same time, and on a Mac a lot of those problems were non-existent, plus the Mac approach would allow me to use things only available on a Mac, like easy sandboxing and potentially keychain integration for auth.

I found a Mac VPS provider that ran Xserves and hosted copies of Lion server inside VMware (HostMyApple, not someone fudging the licensing in moms basement). It worked really, really well, as long as I treated it like a headless server (issues with Lion Server are another story for another time). My sandboxing worked, performance was fantastic aside from the CPU usage during a cache miss, so I was fairly happy.

Long story short though, memory leaks in 3rd party libraries (that only someone running a server would likely hit), coupled with higher hosting costs (and fewer choices), smaller community and a desire to use some things that are really only "mature" in other languages (database adapters, etc), caused me to spend a few days porting the entire thing to Python.

My site now runs on a Linode, and is a nearly identical clone of the obj-c version, ported as a Python/Bottle app. There was nothing particularly wrong with the obj-c approach, but the primary focus of nearly all obj-c developers and libraries is iOS, where processes never live longer than a few minutes, or Mac where a crash or leak is only going to affect one person rather than a few hundred in-flight requests. I expect if I had stuck with one of the "frameworks" intended for this purpose it would have been a viable option but as I said before I wasn't looking for turn-key, but wanting to get my hands dirty :)

prodigal_erik2• 14 years ago

Compared to the JVM (and probably even V8), it's slow. Compared to Javascript or Ruby or Python, it's no more expressive, probably less. And it's more dangerous than any of those, being just as brittle as C. I don't see any relevant niche in which it's best suited, other than being artificially blessed for half of the smartphone market.

mrsteveman13• 14 years ago

Slow is something you're going to have to define more, in which situations? Drawing? String parsing? Concurrency? And in which real world situations does obj-c "slowness" hurt it where any of the others you mentioned would be a better fit?

prodigal_erik2• 14 years ago

Message dispatch: The Hotspot JVM contains years of work to branch-on-type or inline as many method bodies as possible, while the ObjC runtime has to search a cache for the IMP to handle a SEL and then jump through that function pointer (which superscalar pipelines really hate) every time you do anything.

Object layout: The modern ObjC runtime imposes some indirection on every field access (because your old object code doesn't know the current size of your base class), where a JIT compiler can bake offsets right into machine code.

GC: ObjC has a conservative collector, so it has to do some work for each dead object rather than just copying the live ones and recycling the whole arena. And a lot of people still use reference counting, which is the slowest high-overhead form of GC by far.

It's all clever stuff but seriously compromised by the need to produce static object code that's resilient against changes. If you can afford ObjC, you can probably afford a bigger runtime where everything really is an object and the slightest mistake doesn't blow up randomly.

Using Objective-C On The Server

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