Saturday, October 13, 2012

Time for an Objective-C web framework?

More good news for Objective-C weenies like myself from the programming language popularity front: since we last checked in January of this year, Objective-C has now not only leapfrogged C# (now 50% above!), but even managed to edge out C++ and maintain that edge for 4 months. Amazing times, especially for us stealth-marketing hardened NeXTies.

With Ruby now at about 20% of the Objective-C popularity ratings (whatever those mean), maybe there is room to extend the Objective-C stack to the web? Especially as we are experiencing a shift in technologies from MVC frameworks to REST backends.

After all, we had this in the past, with core object models bridged to the UI with AppKit, to legacy databases with EOF and to the web with WebObjects. Now we could do mobile, desktop and server with a common, well-tested object model. Some say crafting object models this way is a Good Idea™. Thoughts?

2 comments:

brasspen said...

A web framework sounds like fun. But the reason I'm learning Objective-C is to learn about the Squeak VM. The SqueakPureObjc.xcodeproj code I've been exploring referred to a MetaObject created bitmap conversion file used by JMM. I want to update your SqueakCocoa vm to contemporary Objective-C. Our vm.s have become too complicated and we need a learner vm. Yours is perfect.

Chris Cunnington
The Squeak Board

Marcel Weiher said...

Thank you!

I always felt that VMs could be done much simpler in Objective-C. For example, you could implement primitives (and plugins) as simply messages sent to the VM...