On Aug 9, 2011, at 9:06 PM, Michael Gentry wrote:

> We were all sad to see WO (and EOF)
> wither and die, but at least T5+Cayenne seems to work rather well
> together.

The news of WO's death are greatly exaggerated. There's still a thriving, 
active developer community (wocommunity.org), the WebObjects binaries are still 
available from Apple (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL688) and there's a yearly 
developer's conference (http://www.wowodc.com/) - next year's is planned for 
June 29th-July 1st in Montreal and there are plans for a WO Boot-Camp for new 
developers in the days just prior.

Apple itself has stopped formally releasing new versions to the public, but 
they participate in the community by contributing improvements and even entire 
frameworks to Project Wonder https://github.com/projectwonder/wonder, which is 
where all new development is at externally. Wonder is quite active with almost 
daily commits.

Just some of the most recent improvements include:
- ERRest - a framework that provides easy-to-implement REST services in json, 
xml, .plist, binary .plist, etc.
- ERModernD2W - a CSS/AJAX-based DirectToWeb framework that allows you to 
create great looking web sites incredibly quickly by removing much of the UI 
programming
- ERSolr framework (in beta: 
https://github.com/tbritt/wonder/tree/master/Frameworks/EOAdaptors/JavaSolrAdaptor)
 that makes Solr just another data source (EOAdaptor) with arbitrarily complex 
queries using standard EOQualifiers.
- WOUnit framework http://hprange.github.com/wounit/ for simplifying unit 
testing with EOF

The development tools are now all Eclipse-based using the WOLips plugin 
https://github.com/wolips/wolips, which is a much better java development 
environment than Xcode ever was (shudder).

The biggest problem is that the current state of documentation is horrible. 
It's a mix of old Apple documentation (which is completely obsolete for the 
developer tools) and community-created documentation which may or may not 
reflect the current state of how to do things. The developer list is quite 
active though with lots of people with 5-10 years of WO/EOF experience.

David Avendasora

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