| Hi all,
I would like to share my experience with WO.
We have developed many systems with WO, some of them was for a big telephone company here in Mexico. After some changes in the IT department in this company they decided to change all the system developed with WO. They call HP, MS and many other companies to get a proposal for the change of this systems, after many meetings with these people they decided to leave the system because the cost and time of development was out of they budget (we have developed that systems in a very short time and the cost was small compared with the other companies because all the facilities of WO). The system survived some time but finally the get the money and changed the systems.
For a long time I was afraid to leave the WO dev tools. I have developed many applications and I can’t find any thing close to this tools. But for customers decision we need to look for new tools and luckily we have found tools that let us forget of the awesome of WO.
We have developed with Entity Framework, XAML and C#, VisualStudio, not perfect but for many systems has everything that you need.
Other tool that we have used for a small (tiny) projects is Groovy on Grails. Fast, easy to learn, develop and deploy.
Now we are very excited using the new _javascript_ tools like SproutCore, Ember, nodeJS, MongoDB, etc.. The things that you can achieve with this tools are amazing. Most of the people behind SproutCore and Ember have worked for Apple.
Before we found this platforms we lost projects because the lack of enough developers to support the WO systems and the stories in Internet that said WO is dead (We know is not dead but is very hard to convince the other people).
I'm still using WO for internal and personal projects, but now I’m migrating everything to the _javascript_ world.
Regards,
Daniel.
Subject: Re: WebObjects-Projects?
Date: March 7, 2014 at 4:34:50 CST
On 05.03.2014, at 12:37, Jürgen Simon <email@hidden> wrote:
Hello,
this is not a technical inquiry, more a temperature check on the business side of WebObjects. It is my impression that at least in Germany, after the 2008/2009 crisis the market for WebObjects-projects has really been down a lot. I have been looking hi and lo for opportunities to work with WO again, but apart from self-initiated projects there was nothing going on.
Is this perception limited to Germany or is it even just me? Are there any project marketplaces for WO that I am not aware of? How much of a future would you guys think WO really has?
Kind Regards,
Jürgen
A (sad) success story:
I have an existing customer (large world-wide operating corporation) with some very old WO apps which I maintain. They also have a small app based on D2W with the old neutral look. This app has been created by some JEE folks who had no clue about WO. The app primarily generates product related PDF files from text-snippets stored and maintained in the database. Maintenance of the data is done by the D2W application. The JEE folks were not able to properly use WO and had big performance problems with PDF generation. So they build a library where they access the database with raw JDBC calls (!!) and have an instance of the app running on a dedicated PC somewhere in a corner so to not block the interactive parts. I have since taken over this application and first of all thrown out everything JDBC related. Redesigned the database structure (they had most of the logic in the data instead of in the databse structure), implemented proper management of the product related spec sheets, and re-
Unfortunately corporate IT wants to take over the project and kill it (it doesn't fit in with their strategy), customer is furious but the decisions are made elsewhere. We'll see.
Another success story:
I am a part time teacher and have tried to cover the module "object oriented development of multiuser database applications" using Wonder. Fortunately the school has given me quite some slack. One of my students from last year (I am currently teaching this module the 3rd time) has introduced Wonder to his employer and could setup a new project! As far as I know both my former student and his boss are happy. YEAH!
It's difficult finding WO work. Wherever Java is wanted JEE/Hibernate/Spring/JSF/younameit is asked for, or then its dot-net. No way to do anything with WO. I was able to be introduced privately to an older rather rich person who has a lot of his money stuffed away in real estate. For him I could develop a finance tracking application for his investments so that his daughter will be able to maintain the finances once he is gone (which I hope will not be so soon....). That's a modern look ERD2W application hosted by my company. Customer is happy so far and plans for more.
But I agree, it is very difficult finding WO work. It's not the tools, it's not WO, it's probably not even the closed-source thing, it's just the buzzwords that are completely missing. Nobody in the Java world is even considering something other than JEE and friends because "that's the standard".
Sad but true.
---markus---
Markus Ruggiero
email@hidden
Check out the new book about Project Wonder and WebObjects on http://learningthewonders.com/
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