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WebObjects ran the website of the nhl for a long time

It’s a tad ironic to see todays modern tad rediscovering the use of presentation templates much like WebObjects, ColdFusion and others quietly did for a long time and were ostracized for.

I did WO/EO for several years until 2001 including the USPS Postmaster app, and it was incredibly productive. This was before JS took over everything, but I can't ever recall being able to do so many client/server web apps with so little effort. Sure the tooling was sometimes lame (ProjectBuilder was a precursor to Xcode) but Objective-C at the time was amazing compared to all other web programming languages. I think WO was far easier to develop in than today's complex web stack, but clearly serving the simpler need of that time. It wouldn't be useful today.

Its spirit lives on Jakarta EE and Spring.

ColdFusion, may it remain buried for good. I was forced to use it in the 90's and was struck by how much more work it was to get something sensible up and running with it compared to using Perl. I finally got them to ditch it and life was good - or at least better.