Steve Jobs’s company made the name change official last week and at its Webmania event in San Francisco last week NeXT Software Inc introduced the promised WebObjects programming tools for automating World Wide Web page creation, designing Web services and tying them into corporate databases (CI No 2,728). WebObjects comes in different versions depending on how advanced and complex the user wants the Web site to be. The $3,000 WebObjects Pro enables developers to incorporate C, C++ and Objective C code into Web-based applications and access Object Linking & Embedding data types stored in Windows applications. WebObjects Enterprise is a $25,000 development system for organizations that want to encapsulate data from existing applications into their Web sites and develop both internal and external Web sites. A free scripting language-based version of WebObjects is available from NeXT’s Web site. NeXT has created a WebConstructor consulting group which will offer various packages to support Web development using WebObjects, including database adaptation, from $50,000, mainframe application adaptation at $50,000, prototyping a system in two months for $75,000. NeXT says it will also support Java programming and the Sun Microsystems Inc-Netscape Communications Corp JavaScript scripting language in WebObjects, but still hasn’t decided whether it will adopt Java for its NeXTstep and OpenStep products. The first release of WebObjects ships next month with support for building Web applications that incorporate Java applets and JavaScript code to run on the client. Future versions will support Java and JavaScript for building server-based applications. NeXT is preparing a major update to its Windows- and Mac-based NeXTstep-OpenStep lines with Portable Distributed Objects release 4.0, now expected next quarter (CI No 2,731).
