Absolutely. WO was a brilliantly designed framework (especially for the time) and being somewhat disillusioned with the state of web development in the last decade, I'm still using it as the UI layer for some of my own applications. It just can't be beat when it comes to throwing together a quick app, essentially being AppKit for the web. And as you say, it's influence was great, although I often wish it had a little more influence.
EOF was a great ORM framework as well and I never really understood ORM hate - until I had to use ORM frameworks other than EOF which generally feel … not that great. I ditched EOF a decade back though, due to it being, well, dead, and replaced it with Cayenne which is an excellent, actively developed ORM that feels very much inspired by EOF's design principles.
In the last few years, I've been working on a WO inspired framework (to the point of almost being a WO clone on the component/templating side) as a side project. It's still very raw when seen from the outside, no documentation and still operating under a bad codename - but hoping to make a release and port my remaining WO apps in the coming year. Hopefully it will add at least a bit to WO's influence on the web development world :).
Especially hilarious when you think of the rising popularity of HTMX.
WebObjects at the time revolutionary model of using the URL for state management would work really well with the new trend back towards server side rendered components.
Totally. I've been very happy to see the world embrace htmx in the last year and it's given me confidence knowing I'm doing the right thing with ng-objects.
The methodology htmx uses is in many ways identical to what we've been doing in the WO world for almost 20 years using Ajax.framework (which I don't know if you're familiar with), a WO plugin framework that most importantly adds "partial page updates". So you can wrap a part of a page/component in a container element, and target it so only that element gets rendered/replaced on the client side when an action is invoked (link clicked, form submitted etc.).
And yes, combined with WO's stateful server side rendering and URLs, it's ridicilously powerful. I usually design my WO apps so users never actually see a stateful URL, they always land on "static URLs" while stateful intra-page work happens through page replacements. I love it.
EOF was a great ORM framework as well and I never really understood ORM hate - until I had to use ORM frameworks other than EOF which generally feel … not that great. I ditched EOF a decade back though, due to it being, well, dead, and replaced it with Cayenne which is an excellent, actively developed ORM that feels very much inspired by EOF's design principles.
In the last few years, I've been working on a WO inspired framework (to the point of almost being a WO clone on the component/templating side) as a side project. It's still very raw when seen from the outside, no documentation and still operating under a bad codename - but hoping to make a release and port my remaining WO apps in the coming year. Hopefully it will add at least a bit to WO's influence on the web development world :).
https://github.com/ngobjects/ng-objects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obvt93wSFc