PSIG 33: Thursday May 4th, 2000

John McMahon, President of Parallel Software, presented Apple's WebObjects. For those of you who don't know, WebObjects was NeXT's advanced web application server framework. Apple got it when it purchased NeXT, and is wisely investing in it. WebObjects allows you to quickly build robust, scalable, interactive web sites which tie into your database of choice. While you can use both Objective C and Java to encode your site's logic, you'll find WebObjects comes with lots of built-in functionality that minimizes the amount of coding you'll need to do.

Before the presentation began, John asked us to choose between a serious business-style presentation and a more-engaging, playful presentation. Needless to say, we chose the playful presentation.

John then systematically went around the room and assigned each of us a role. Steve Hershey was Bill Gates, Darrin Cardani was Steve Jobs, Mike Menze was Java, Carl Jester was Unix, Earl Weintraub was mainframes, and I was WebObjects (I'm skipping a couple of folks here -- for example, I can't remember what John Clark was). Using an Apple supplied presentation, John described what WebObjects is an how it fits into a business.

While the presentation was largely nontechnical, it did provide and entertaining view of what WebObjects is and how it fits into what folks are doing.

Thursday, May 04, 2000
12:00 AM