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Comment by ashishgandhi | Hacker News Reader

As of now right now (~1374712460) there are two systems that are online: iTunes Connect and Bug Reporter. And both seem to use the cannot-be-killed* WebObjects. You can clearly see that in the URLs as they mention "WebObjects" and end in ".woa" (assuming it means Web Objects Application).

*I've no idea what WebObjects are but I've heard people poke fun at their mention. Would be interesting if someone had more details to share.

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WebObjects is kind of like Rails, but 20 years earlier. (Seriously, it's actually very similar to Rails, in it's bones. I don't know if dhh had seen WebObjects, or they just both had seen some smalltalk mvc framework)

They inherited it from NeXT, and it seriously was really ahead of it's time originally. Hell, it was a technically competent and competitive web framework through, oh, 2002 or 2004, maybe even a few years after that. (Can you tell I used to develop for it?)

But it ended up not being a market Apple wanted to be in, selling a web development framework, and it didn't get much attention, it withered on the vine. (Even if it had... 20 years of legacy is not good for a web framework, it would probably still suck by now -- and who wants a proprietary rather than open source web framework, if they can avoid it?). But they kept using it internally anyway long after they stopped marketting it or selling it externally.

Anyhow, it's really hilarious if the legacy WebObjects part of Apple's web infrastructure are actually the parts that are still up. Hilarious in a pleasant way for those of us who used to use and love WebObjects back in the day.

Yes - this would be another feather in the cap for the old NeXT engineers (and I suppose the folks who have worked to update it since...)

That _could_ be a prime example of security by obscurity. Who would spend time looking for a WebObjects exploit if you can spend that time looking for a Rails exploit?

Someone who wants to post youtube videos on hacking apple developer accounts?

As one example, WebObjects powered the BBC News Online site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News_Online) at launch in 1997.

I was brought in as a contractor in the last few months, so I didn't get much of an overview, but I wrote template code (each page, and each component of a page, had three associated files: .wos for 'scripting', .html for templating, and .wod for 'declarations' to tie the other two together).

It was streets ahead of anything I'd previously used (mainly PHP code with intermingled HTML), and led me to build my next major project using XSLT to provide some insulation between the logic and presentation.

WebObjects is a web application framework. It's OLD old. It's about ten years older than Ruby on Rails, putting it on par with PHP and Ruby itself. NeXT made it and Apple decided to make it free. It was Objective-C and is now Java.

Web Objects was amazing for its time. It actually utilized server-side image maps to make web pages responsive before JavaScript took off.

It's not any older than Interface Builder and other stuff in the Mac OS dev toolkit, as all of that came from NeXT. I would guess though that it has not been maintained or updated.

I used WO in the late nineties and it was way ahead of its time. Enterprise Objects (which morphed into Core Data) was an amazing tool for working with databases. Today it's pretty obsolete and it's not easy to find people.

It's OLD old.

Steve Jobs used to hawk it on 486s while wearing ripped jeans. http://www.foxnews.com/static/managed/img/World/Steve%20Jobs...

I don't know about you, but I can't convert epoch time in my head and I don't know anyone who can. What's benefit is there to posting epoch time instead of in ISO 8601 format?

Yeah, I noticed the WebObjects apps were back quick and first. With all of the iOS 7 bugs filed and the App Store in active use, I'm not at all surprised that they are too big to die for the time being. As for the rest of it, my money is on some Ruby descendant, based solely on the fact that all of the Passbook sample code was Ruby based, with a Sinatra app being the server and a signing gem bundled. I think some of Mavericks server utilities are Ruby based, too.

Isn't the developer portal written in Java too, probably with a mix of frameworks for different components (it certainly had a heterogenous feel on the front end)? I seem to remember some of the signon urls had .woa in them, and one of the former Struts developers mentioned a vulnerability which sounds like a likely candidate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6081428

It'd be interesting to know after all this is over what the vulnerability was, though we'll probably never hear from Apple.

UNIX time, really?

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