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frothkit - Objective-C Web Application Framework

by eluos on 12/2/12, 3:04 PM with 23 comments

  • by yoda_sl on 12/2/12, 4:22 PM

    If I was to develop some web framework in Objective-C I will at least try to mimic the WebObjects framework which has some great concept behind it. The main grief against WebObjects that should be avoided is that the framework layer to access the database aka EOF (Enterprise Objects Framework) was never designed to use a connection pool nor work nicely in a multi-threaded environment.

    Sadly Apple stopped the development of that web solutions years ago and kept it for itself... I heard from various folks at Apple that there are still a few engineers improving it and it is being used a lot for iTunes. WebObjects got some bad reputation from many people that have no clue on how it works and citing that WebObjects can't even support database update and this why the Apple Online Store is often offline when Apple release a new product. This is total BS of course, since take the iTunes AppStore which serve the content for all stores: music, apps, books, movies, etc... And you barely see that iTunes Store is offline.

    WebObjects was a great technology but Apple decided to keep it for itself.

  • by danpalmer on 12/2/12, 4:58 PM

    Looks like this hasn't been updated since 2010, and it's website doesn't load. Also the underlying Cocoa port looks like it hasn't been updated since 2008.

    I think we need a totally new Objective-C framework for web development based on newer design patterns, GCD, etc, but it needs a new port of Foundation and Cocoa to Linux and other systems.

    As much as I'd love an Objective-C web framework, I wouldn't use one that only ran on Mac OS, pretty useless in terms of production hosting I think.

  • by jrajav on 12/2/12, 4:11 PM

    Not entirely related (though I think someone actually is working on a web framework for it): ObjFW [1][2] is an Objective-C framework and runtime that provides Cocoa-like classes and methods, but with more open-sourceness and portability. It even runs on Raspberry Pi!

    [1]: https://webkeks.org/objfw/

    [2]: https://github.com/Midar/objfw (Mirror)

  • by scraplab on 12/2/12, 3:37 PM

    RoutingHTTPServer[1] is nice lightweight library on top of CocoaHTTPServer[2], which behaves a little like Sinatra.

    [1]: https://github.com/mattstevens/RoutingHTTPServer

    [2]: https://github.com/robbiehanson/CocoaHTTPServer

  • by ddfreyne on 12/2/12, 3:29 PM

    Seems to be inactive. It hasn’t been worked on since June 2010.

  • by fyolnish on 12/2/12, 3:29 PM

    Since we're doing this: http://webappkit.org

  • by rjzzleep on 12/2/12, 8:24 PM

    dunno man, congrats i guess? the web part of anything currently to me is nothing but sophisticated text processing.

    frothkit looks wrong, reminds me a bit of asp.net.

  • by yarrel on 12/2/12, 3:36 PM

    I've never heard of WebObjects either.