Well, I totally understand your cepticism about the WO news. In your position, I would also have a hard time believing in stuff like “I can’t say why, but the future looks bright”.

That being said, the only thing I can say more is - do believe it! Again, I can’t say why, the only way you can get the news is by having someone on your company that went to WWDC and that may tell you about the news without breaking the NDAs.

But there are two things I can add:

- Mr. Pierre Frisch is now the WebObjects team manager at Apple, and he’s really commited to make WebObjects go forward. When you see the 5.4 release notes (which should be comming out shortly, or, if not, they will be public when Leopard ships), you will certainly agree with me. It’s, by far, one of the best updates in many years.

- Usually, before WWDCs, people at the WebObjects Dev mailiing list start to go into “panic mode” because there’s no WWDC sessions scheduled. Everyone says “Oh my god, they have killed it!” and stuff like that. Well, this year, no one said that. Not only that, but WOWODC was made. As far as I know, it’s the only satellite conference taking place related to WWDC. Not even Cocoa or any other topic has that (and, although WWDC is a great conference, there’s always room for more info!). And one of the things that we have decided, still during the WOWODC sunday, was that, next year, WOWODC will be a 2-days conference. There is more than enough information to fill both days.

So, bottom line, the “WO is dead” feeling is a thing of the past. The WO community is more confident than never on WO future. And, as Mr Pierre said many times, Apple, today, right now, DEPENDS on WebObjects. If WO stopped working right now, by work of dark forces, Apple would simply stop.

About the iPhone SDK, well, many people suggested that! If by any chance Steve announces that on the next Keynotes, you will certainly hear a huge “YEAHHH!” in the room! But, realistic, I think the WO future is good, but well, not THAT good! Althouhg Apple really surprised me on WWDC 2007…

I would really, really be surprised to see a sudden uprise of activity for a product, which actually only recently lost its prominent Web-Presence on the Apple Website an is now listed as one of many technologies around Mac OS X.

Sorry, but at the moment I have difficulties to believe your overly positive outbreak of “A++++” ratings for some NDA. I do hope that this is not due to some reality distortion field which has something to do with “Oh yeah, we have an SDK for the iPhone, its caled WebObjects”.

Be I will see and hear about this soon, anyway. So thanks for this delicious appetizer.

That is a hard question, and it was highly discussed in WOWODC and WWDC. We are aware that currently there is a very hard learning curve (or, as we call it, learning cliff) because information is not in one place, and some of the available information is outdated.

Resulting from all that discussion, a site was made, http://gettingstartedwithwo.codeferous.com/ that tries to put everything in the same place.

Personally, I highly recommend you to:

1) Buy an used copy of the “Professional WebObjects 5.0 With Java by Thomas Termini et al. Published by Wrox Press, Inc.” book. The first 6 or 7 chapters are really good, and they give you a really nice introduction to WebObjects (if you cannot find any more copies, send me an email).

2) Subscribe the Apple WO-Dev mailing list on the Apple mailing lists site, lists.apple.com, I think.

3) Some months later, buy Chuck’s book.

WebObjects is not a blog-oriented learn-to-be-a-web-developer-in-7-days kind of framework. Like Cocoa, it’s very complex technology, and requires you to learn a bunch of new concepts, understand them, and understand how to work with them. You will learn and learn for years, and feel that there is still a lot to learn. That’s normal!

But the upside of this is that you will also learn that WO is an amazingly well thinked and implemented framework that, after more than 10 years since it’s introduction, still it the most advanced and powerful one. It’s Cocoa for the Web. Many mac folks belive that Cocoa is, by far, the most advanced desktop development environment in the world. That just don’t know that they have the most advanced web development environment right there on their hard drives.

Why is it the best? I think you will learn by yourself!

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