Dear Apple:
When you acquired NeXT, you gained access to two powerful and sibling technologies: Cocoa and WebObjects. Both are built upon stunning and advanced architectural principles, and share many concepts.
A few years later, when you introduced OS X, you promoted Cocoa as the way to build software for Mac. That’s great, because it in fact was a breakthrough compared to what we had to do before (I still remember WaitNextEvent()… ).
Probably because the web was not then what it is now, you decided to not publicly advertise and promote WebObjects, although you saw enough potential on the technology to make it the technical base for all your business. From numerous internal applications to popular industry leading services like Apple Store or iTunes Store, every dollar than gets in or out your company goes trough, at least, one WebObjects app.
This lead to a situation where you made WebObjects evolve according to your needs, barely maintaining a public functional version of the framework. Although the framework by itself is still the one with the most advanced and powerful concepts one can find, the feature gap started to show. This lead to an incredible, amazing, dedicated community to grab the task for themselves and make the work Apple should be doing, adding features, some of them essential for the success of the framework, like XHTML support or Ajax.
So, you’ve just announced WWDC 2009 today. I’m not asking for 18 WebObjects-related sessions like you had in WWDC 2000, because I know that’s unimaginable, given the importance (or lack of it) you attribute to promoting WebObjects. I know there will be one, maybe two, and if we are really lucky, three WebObjects sessions on WWDC 2009. It’s the same every year since I attend WWDC.
But, Apple, you have to tell me… how hard is to respect an entire community, of highly competent and dedicated professionals, who use your technology for years, who kept it alive, who built extensions and IDEs that yourselves are using internally, and adding at least one fucking little reference to WebObjects on the WWDC 2009 IT page? Is it really that hard to do, specially considering you mention other web technologies that are not even made by you?
Or it’s just the iPhone that matters now?
