Obj-C for WebApps? Say WHAT?

We’re going to break from what has been our (so far) regular format of indie business and code articles to point out an interesting occurrence a couple of nights ago that revolves around two tweets that caught my attention, one by Jon Gruber of DaringFireball, the other by Scott Stevenson of Theococao who are two of the best known observers of the Mac/iPhone universe. First  Jon Gruber tweeted about Bombax; a few hours later Scott Stevenson mentioned FrothKit – Bomax and FrothKit are both of which are newly announced WebApp development toolkits. So what’s the big deal with yet another WebApp development framework?  Well, Yet Another Web Stack isn’t news, but what they’re written in is… It seems that behind the scenes there a couple of groups aiming to make Objective-C a player in the Web App development space.

Yes, I said Objective-C.

Hmmm… very interesting, no?  If you talk to most programmers not in the Mac development scene you’ll get a lot of eye-rolling and snark if you dare to mention Objective-C in a serious conversation.  They’ll tell you that it’s “weird” and “no one uses it” and the ultimate insult that Objective-C isn’t a “serious” language like Java, or C++ or even Ruby and Python.

So, what happened?  Well, the iPhone happened.  And, over the last 1-1/2 years a lot of people have learned a lot about this “unserious” language Objective-C.  According to Apple the iPhone SDK has been downloaded several hundred thousand times since the introduction of the SDK, and given the gold-rush aura of the AppStore that’s a lot of new blood in what has been for most of the last decade a pretty elite community – and all of them having to learn about Cocoa programming and Objective-C.

Of course, Obj-C is just as serious as Java, C++ or any language you can name.  It pre-dates all of the popular web development languages by almost a generation,  but now suddenly it finds itself with what might be a critical mass of users, and clearly a few devotées think the time is right to slap down those preconceptions and to extend the reach of Obj-C and the Cocoa design patterns out onto the web.

So, what do we have here?

Bombax is a MacOSX based web development framework.  It uses Cocoa frameworks and is delivered as an addition to Xcode that adds new application template types that to allow developers to create web applications. So, if you know how to write Mac or iPhone apps, you have all the skills you need to start writing code in Bombax.  Templating inside web pages is done via BXML which is your generic PHP-like set of template tags, the difference here of course is that the back end being called is an Objective-C runtime.  The resulting code can be run on OSX desktop or OSX Server environments

FrothKit that a more generic approach – it is a generic Objective-C framework that allows developers to create webapps that are deployed on standard Linux servers. It too is installed as a set of extentions to XCode but adds one more twist, since it’s not meant to actually run the resulting web application on MacOSX but instean on Linux boxes, you need to install Cocotron which is an Open Source project lead by Christopher Lloyd, an iPhone/Mac developer,  aimed at creating a cross-platform Objective-C development platform based on Apple’s published Cocoa API.

The FrothKit framework itself provides a simple full-stack web app development environment with support for MySQL and Amazon’s SimpleDB with a focus on deployment to Amazone EC2. The docs are a lot more sparse for FrothKit  but it looks from, their “backgrounder” that they too plan on a lightweight templating system, and support similar to that of Bombax (which is to say PHP-like tags) with all the expected hooks to talk to Obj-C classes and objects.

Bombax looks to be a commercial product – it s in “open beta” at the moment, and the developers are activley looking both people willing to experiment wih their beta, and accoding to their web site they are also looking to hire developers and designers to fill out there team.

FrothKit is an Open Source project hosted on Google Code that, as emtnoned above, builds on top of he Cocoatron project.

Both of these efforts seem to be very early in their development but its really amazing that with all the well established web app development tools out there both of these groups have decided to make a little noise and do something very, very different.

We’ll have more on both these packages soon; including some experimentation/demos of both and hopefully interviews with both teams to get some more insights into what they are working on and why they decided to challenge the status quo with these new projects.

[Update: Yes, I know WebObjects was an Obj-C WebApp framework before it was ported to Java - and the argument could well be made its was the first comprehensive full-stack WebApp framework - it doesn't lessen the impact of the fact that now in the age of ubiquitous WebApp frameworks someone is trying to add something new with a language that has until now lived in a small niche compared to so-called mainstream programming languages and development tools.]