Steve Jobs Introduces WebObjects [video] (1996)

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs/

by lpsz • 12 years ago

186 98 12 years ago

channel9.msdn.com

lpsz• 12 years ago

At the 23:50 mark the slides follow the familiar model seen in Apple media events today.

The approach: in 3-4 concluding slides, concisely reiterate key selling points, compatibility, price, and the availability timeline. I've always found this approach to be particularly effective -- I'm highly likely to unambiguously remember these most important bits given that they are presented last.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

I wouldn't say that's exclusive to Apple or something they came up with - sounds like sales 101 to me.

danso• 12 years ago

What a trip to see Steve Jobs not only try to sell something pre-iPod-success, but something as technical and relatively pedestrian as a web framework...And he does it well, without the use of a primetime-polished slideshow or catchphrases.

The one visual that sticks out to me in this video: the silhouettes of people arriving mid-speech and leaving early.

nemo• 12 years ago

"relatively pedestrian as a web framework"

In early '96 having a RAD MVC web framework backed by an ORM was really pretty groundbreaking (even moving codebases relatively seamlessly between an OpenStep desktop app and WO was possible), though yeah, this was Jobs going after the Enterprise audience rather than consumer electronics, very different vibe.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

For anyone confused: What Steve pronounces as Olé/Olay is OLE.

nailer2• 12 years ago

There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms. One suck.com writer was called 'Duke of URL' pronounced like 'Duke of Earl'

rwc• 12 years ago

The Yahoo campus cafe URLs is pronounced "Earl's"

philwelch• 12 years ago

Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Things like "U.S.A." where you only pronounce the letters are called initialisms.

neoeldex• 12 years ago

I say Earl when I speak of U.R.L.s. And I'm not ashamed of it.

meepmorp3• 12 years ago

How would you pronounce it?

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

Oh El Eee, like the names of its constituent letters.

But then I've never heard it pronounced, only ever read it. So maybe "Olay" was the normal pronunciation.

bparsons• 12 years ago

You arrr ell

ajasmin• 12 years ago

Never mind how it's pronounced. No developers in their right mind would automate Excel from their web server the way they did in that demo!

eropple• 12 years ago

Many developers "in their right mind" did exactly that. For a pretty long time, this was the way people manipulated spreadsheets in an automated fashion unless you wanted to buy expensive products from third-party vendors.

jodrellblank• 12 years ago

So many people do that Microsoft keeps a knowledge base article about it:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757

"We don't recommend or support it but because you want to do it anyway, here's what to consider to make it work less badly"

dangerboysteve• 12 years ago

Man can Steve sell and make things look good. I used Webobjects for some projects back in the day.

pjmlp5• 12 years ago

I read somewhere that WebObjects were in part the inspiration for JEE.

Somehow the OpenStep efforts got sidestep by making Oak into Java and everything else got ramped down.

I wonder how it would have been if Sun had kept with OpenStep instead.

philippeback2• 12 years ago

The spirit of this lives here: http://seaside.st/about

And it is an awesome framework.

ReactJs is going the same kind of components based thing these days. Nothing so new, except for where the component is running...

applecore• 12 years ago

A couple of tangentially related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611

ankurpatel• 12 years ago

"We love the Internet Explorer browser very much" - Steve (6:58 minutes)

stffndtz• 12 years ago

- said no apple employee ever.

nchelluri• 12 years ago

I am not entirely sure about this.

While I don't have personal experience, from what I've read, IE on Mac was a fair bit different from IE on Windows. IE 5 for Mac, released in 2000, used something called the Tasman engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29

At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS.

Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...:

The Macintosh Edition introduced a new rendering engine called Tasman that was designed to be more compliant with emerging W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS Level 1, DOM Level 1, and ECMAScript.

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that back while IE for Windows was giving web developers prematurely grey hair, IE for Mac was a much nicer browser and much more comfortable to support as a development target. I think it ended up getting less time/thought/effort from Microsoft eventually. Also, Safari was released in 2003 (beta in January, default browser in OS X 10.3 Panther, in October).

afandian• 12 years ago

IE on Mac was really good, back in the day. More standards compliant than the Windows version and a different codebase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

acomjean• 12 years ago

This may have been back when apple needed ie mac as web sites weren't working well on mac.

For a while sadly it really was the best web browser for mac.

meepmorp3• 12 years ago

For a while, it was the best web browser, period, on any platform (including Solaris and HP-UX). Netscape kinda blew.

dchest• 12 years ago

He was at NeXT, not Apple in 1996.

daigoba662• 12 years ago

So much so that IE for Mac shipped as the default web browser for Mac OS from 1998 onward until Safari was announced in 2003.

aarestad• 12 years ago

Considering Cyberdog was the only thing Apple had at the time, that's not surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

cowmix• 12 years ago

He's obviously in pain here, selling business software on NT of all platforms.

The timing of this video is funny because soon after he went back to Apple to recapture the glory which is consumer electronics.

pjmlp5• 12 years ago

You are talking about the days when Apple was about to close its doors after the Copland failed experiment and NT was picking up steam against UNIX based workstations.

In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops.

NeXT was also going multi-platform with OpenStep.

rbanffy2• 12 years ago

It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 12 years ago

Sounds like the Enterprise Objects Framework was an ORM?

Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework

Apparently it provided the basis for Core Data, too.

threeseed3• 12 years ago

It was actually one of the first and heavily inspired the beginnings of Hibernate.

And yes it is the basis of Core Data.

heyts• 12 years ago

I would really like to know how cutting-edge this was at the time. It seems incredible to me how little has changed in how we make dynamic web applications.

daigoba662• 12 years ago

At the end of the day every dynamic web application does the same thing: concatenate and send back strings.

micampe• 12 years ago

Sure, let's go down that road. At the end of the day every software that runs does the same thing: flip bits back and forth.

jmulho3• 12 years ago

From 1996 to 2005 dynamic web applications concatenated and sent back strings. After that we started sending back strings and concatenating. Sadly half the web hasn't caught on to the "new" way.

slantyyz• 12 years ago

I used to sell WebObjects projects during the dotcom boom and the ORM was a big selling point. There weren't a lot of frameworks or web dev options back then.

Looking at options today, I feel like a kid in a candy store.

wodev• 12 years ago

WebObjects is still available and in use by a small but active circle today.

http://wocommunity.org

It moved from Objective-C to Java under Apple. Apple discontinued shipping it with OS X Server Snow Leopard, but the frameworks are still available/free. The community picked up where Apple left off with the open source Project WOnder.

It is a full stack development framework. Enterprise Objects Framework(EOF) is the ORM or Model layer like Cayenne or Hibernate. WebObject components are the front end View layer like you might get from Tapestry.

I have yet to find a web framework that rivals its Controller layer, DirectToWeb (D2W). D2W sits between the Model and the View. It can generate Views automatically using information from the model and with customizable direction from a rule system. It also provides controller actions with customizable callbacks.

Out of the box, WebObjects can reverse engineer your database, constructing a full model of it, and D2W can then construct a full blown Create/Read/Update/Delete interface to it with no coding required. If you don't have a database, you build a model and WebObjects can generate the SQL necessary to create the database for you as well.

It's still pretty amazing, despite being treated like an ugly step child by Apple. It still powers the billion dollar iTunes store as well AFAIK.

grecy2• 12 years ago

I was a WebObjects Developer for 2 years from 2007-2009, the company I worked for still uses it for their massive health-care-related web apps. It's a really cool framwork to use, as it incorporates so many aspects that are usually provided by different libraries.

The developer community is small, but very active. Every year they hold a "World of Web Objects (WOWO)" conference right around WWDC in San Fran.

Project Wonder has done amazing work to bring Ajax and many other "Web 2.0" features to WO.

It does still power the iTunes store, and the Apple Store. A friend of mine that worked at our sister company landed a job with Apple working on the iTunes store, and AFAIK, he's still there doing that today.

jacques_chester• 12 years ago

Oracle Application Express can do something like reverse engineer a database and produce a full CRUD interface.

And it's perfectly, utterly awful.

goodgoblin• 12 years ago

Web Objects was the first web framework I worked in, back in 2001, and I didn't really understand it at the time, but it already had built and running in production many of the features that I subsequently came into contact with via supposed innovations in other stacks. The J2EE 1.3 spec for example added "entity beans" and unleashed hideous vendor implementations like WebSphere on developers. The impact of all the anti-patterns that spec inspired are still visible in the development world today - I'd say it is indirectly responsible for the rise of Spring and Rails.

WO also had the added benefit of being a full-stack solution. The way the J2EE spec was built up of sub-specs really contributed to the fragmented Java framework universe. Developers then had to get used to spending think-time reasoning about the way the pieces and "tiers" fit together and less time building coherent apps.

lukev• 12 years ago

It's remarkable to see a presentation presenting programmatic construction of HTML as a novel concept.

biafra• 12 years ago

This was 1996. WebObjects was far ahead of anything I used at the time. I started using WO and EOF in 1999 and it had stuff like scaffolding (D2W) at that time. When did RoR introduce this?

pjmlp5• 12 years ago

That is the thing with RoR.

There were frameworks before it that offered similar functionality, but since the web was growing up only a few developers got to see them.

state• 12 years ago

"Giving your credit card to someone over the phone is far less secure than giving it to someone over the web." [27:53]

whizzkid• 12 years ago

What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing.

It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that.

quux• 12 years ago

He actually wasn't that passionate about enterprise stuff, but could clearly make it look like he was in important events like this. I think at this time, he was getting tired of NeXT and was looking to sell the company so he could focus on Pixar, or something like that. He was really tired of the computer business. I remember seeing an interview with him from around the same time period where the interviewer asked him to talk about NeXT's enterprise stuff and the response was something like "You don't really want to hear about that right? It's not really that interesting."

scj• 12 years ago

That was the 1995 Cringley interview. About 54 minutes in. "You don't really want to hear about NeXT, do you?" was the exact statement. And he claims that innovation in the computer industry is in software within seconds.

I think Jobs' response was more about disarming the perceived courtesy. While polite to ask Jobs about what he was doing with NeXT in 1995, the highlight of his career (and general interest) would be with Apple and to a lesser degree, Pixar.

Kind of like talking to a rock legend about their latest album, when most people care about their breakout period.

_pmf_• 12 years ago

What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing. It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that.

He's the world's greatest used car salesman.

takahisah2• 12 years ago

The QA is really interesting. Most of the questions I felt he handled well and showed that he has knowledge of the domain. Two questions in particular stood out:

Q: How can I, as a developer, get my hands on the expensive software suite?

A: Come talk to us. We can accommodate developers who are willing.

This may have been some early input for him to think about sdks and the philosophy of providing developers with tools early on.

Q: What is your view of transactions on the web?

A: We don't think it's a technology problem. It's more of a social/business problem

He was clearly wrong on this one, with the advent of cutting edge technology companies like PayPal and Stripe that followed.

X-Istence• 12 years ago

I don't see how he was wrong.

Transactions on the web exist, there are improvements to the UI but it is a social problem (I am afraid of my credit card being stolen) and business problem (Don't worry, trust us we won't let anything bad happen to your credit card).

takahisah2• 12 years ago

He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial, as long as society and businesses would get behind the movement. I don't think that is the case from a security standpoint and also designing an api that would allow for widespread adoption.

Tycho• 12 years ago

Hmm I was more impressed by PayPal's business tenacity than with their technical ingenuity. Along with the entrenched credit card companies they had to deal with fraud and organized crime.

codeulike• 12 years ago

He was clearly wrong on this one

No, he was right. In 1996 people were just scared of using their cards online. No one big was doing it yet, consumers didn't trust anything about the end-to-end process. There are more risks now than there were then, if anything (given how many trojans and hackers there are targeting cards now), but people are used to it now.

Paypal didn't bring any particularly new technology, they just bought confidence and bigness.

mwcampbell• 12 years ago

Interesting that he dismissed interpreted languages for non-trivial code, as if it were obvious that the performance wouldn't be good enough. But wasn't Perl already being used for CGI scripts in 1996?

kevinchen• 12 years ago

I'm sure you could make it work, but back then fewer engineer-hours had gone into making interpreted languages fast, and hardware was slower. It was also common to run a website on one machine.

Tangentially related: https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213

"> @spolsky: Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page views, 5 servers. What am I missing? << That's the PHP factor"

pjmlp5• 12 years ago

Yes and it was a pain.

I learned never ever again to use interpreted languages for anything else other than shell scripting.

kalleboo• 12 years ago

At the end you can see a glimpse of the UI for Concurrence, the presentation software Steve Jobs used up until Apple created Keynote.

http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...

Found this story about the first time Steve Jobs moved from using physical slides to Concurrence running on a NeXT http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92...

a_rahmanshah• 12 years ago

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q

dtanl• 12 years ago

Great job by Steve Jobs!

lucaspottersky• 12 years ago

So, about the 10x programmer myth, productivity etc...

Steve mentions that it took about 3 weeks with 3 programmers to build this app. The tools & technologies have evolved and today we can build this kind of thing with a tiny fraction of this effort...

To me that's the kind of thing that really matters after all: evolving technology & tools, not the "10x programmer myth", or those "how to be more productive" tutorials. The tech evolution has a much bigger impact on productivity than those individual productivity recipees.

ovi256• 12 years ago

Those programmers were arguably 10x or 100x programmers, not run-of-the-mill. They made a choice to work on new technology, solving a hard problem. And then put in the effort, probably with little handholding, and managing the uncertainty.

These are traits not found in the average or even median programmer.

collyw• 12 years ago

I can see close to 10x productivity gains depending on my work environment. If I have three meetings spaced throughout the day, a ton of quick interruptions, and I am trying to learn something new, forget it. If I get to focus on that one thing, then I can be pretty productive.

I also think that the 10x thing is more to do over the longer term (rather than "look at what I bashed out in 2 hours"). I probably don't code as quickly as I used to, but I am a lot more thorough, and having made plenty of crappy mistakes designing my code in the past, I am in a far better position to know what will make my code robust, and maintainable time a month or two down the line.

crazychrome• 12 years ago

And, 100x cheaper, if taking consideration of free cloud offerings.

These profound factors keep me working everyday, although I haven't made my millions yet. There was an article about Nokia or Ericsson around early 2000, saying that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short term but underestimate in long run. It's the case.

based2• 12 years ago

http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse...

https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-users/200...

http://vschart.com/compare/apache-tapestry/vs/webobjects

http://tapestry.apache.org/

CptMauli• 12 years ago

One interesting thing for me was, to see how slow the server interaction really was.

Steve Jobs Introduces WebObjects [video] (1996)

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