WebObjects Rocks

If you probably didn't know I am a software developer. However, these days I am a web developer mostly. A little over a year ago I was asked to develop a hosted application. A hosted application is one which clients pay to use. This application is now available and it is called Portfolio Intelligence by 3 Olive Solutions (http://www.3olivesolutions.com). During the requirements process we decided that money was an object and that we should go the open source route as much as possible. Well I had just recently did a fair amount of work with PHP and mySQL so I knew we could go that route. The problem was I didn't care for PHP that much. I was much more comfortable with Java and real objects, etc. Well it just so happened that I also owned two XServes and they came with a deployment license for WebObjects. WebObjects wasn't free but danm near close at about $499 for a developer. In addition, in my past I had to review about a half dozen application servers back in the dot-com days and WebObjects was getting fabulous reviews. The problem was it wasn't Java.

Anyway, we decided that we would use WebObjects for this new project and a year later all I can say is WOW! WebObjects rocks. I have used other application and O/R mapping tools in my past but they can't hold a candle to WebObjects. Direct-to-web is a godsend for reporting, quick prototyping, etc., and Enterprise Objects with the Editing Context is light years above anything else I have used. Needless to say, after about a year we launched a rock solid application with flexible charting (thank you jFreeChart (http://www.jfreechart.org) and a great ad-hoc report generator with export to Excel (thank you Direct-to-Web of WebObjects).

Recently I had to port my app to WebSphere running DB2. Well I did and I don't have to do anything special. The database is determined at runtype and my EOModelPrototype is selected that correctly maps the objects to the relational table. That is very slick.

Wel I could go on, but then, maybe others would catch the WebObjects bug and the secret would really come out that WebObjects rocks!