That’s a guess of The Apple Blog, the Apple Store will get rewritten using Ruby on Rails. If it’s true, that will be another big achievement for Rails and it’ll get even more serious attention.
Apple has been using their WebObjects (based on J2EE) technology for some time. WebObjects has not been a success and I guess Apple is the only company to use it. Since they will be shipping Rails with Leopard, that would be a logical move but writting something as big as the store is not free. I’m not sure they would have any interested to do that.
I didn’t check for such job description on their job board, it’s usually a good indicator of next moves in the company.
CTO at 
Comments
Yes, I’m bumbling around old entries on your weblog, coming here through a link from the Fink mailing list (I think) to your entry about problems with Rails and Ruby 1.8.5.
But, I thought I’d just point out on this entry: WebObjects may not have been a smashing success, but it was actually what saved NeXT’s bacon long enough to be bought by Apple. Dell’s store was built on WebObjects (they switched after Apple bought NeXT). In addition to running not only the Apple Store but the iTunes back end, WebObjects is still running banking web sites like Fleet, TD Canada, a fair number of shopping sites around the world, and, I’m told, the BBC. WebObjects is essentially like Cocoa for the web — it’s very customizable and has superb RAD tools. It’s in no way been a failure.
I like Rails a lot, but I can’t help but suspect the rumor that Apple is going to move away from WebObjects is somewhat wishful extrapolation from the news that Rails would be included with OS X Leopard. It’s hard to imagine what advantage Apple would get from such a move: it’d require a WHOLE LOT of work, WebObjects is performing excellently for them, and even if WebObjects’ star has faded over the years, it’s not as if Apple in particular has to worry about the vendor cancelling their support.
Watts31 January 07 at 5:38 am
Yes, I’m bumbling around old entries on your weblog, coming here through a link from the Fink mailing list (I think) to your entry about problems with Rails and Ruby 1.8.5.
But, I thought I’d just point out on this entry: WebObjects may not have been a smashing success, but it was actually what saved NeXT’s bacon long enough to be bought by Apple. Dell’s store was built on WebObjects (they switched after Apple bought NeXT). In addition to running not only the Apple Store but the iTunes back end, WebObjects is still running banking web sites like Fleet, TD Canada, a fair number of shopping sites around the world, and, I’m told, the BBC. WebObjects is essentially like Cocoa for the web — it’s very customizable and has superb RAD tools. It’s in no way been a failure.
I like Rails a lot, but I can’t help but suspect the rumor that Apple is going to move away from WebObjects is somewhat wishful extrapolation from the news that Rails would be included with OS X Leopard. It’s hard to imagine what advantage Apple would get from such a move: it’d require a WHOLE LOT of work, WebObjects is performing excellently for them, and even if WebObjects’ star has faded over the years, it’s not as if Apple in particular has to worry about the vendor cancelling their support.
Watts30 January 07 at 10:38 pm
Hi Watts,
Thanks for your info about WebObjects, actually I didn’t know the whole story behind WebObjects…
I also agree that using Rails for the store is not going to happen and you make a good point saying that as Apple own the technology, there is no real interest in changing anything.
Frederic Brunel31 January 07 at 1:55 pm
Hi Watts,
Thanks for your info about WebObjects, actually I didn’t know the whole story behind WebObjects…
I also agree that using Rails for the store is not going to happen and you make a good point saying that as Apple own the technology, there is no real interest in changing anything.
Fred Brunel31 January 07 at 6:55 am
So when is the Rails Apple store going live again? Just a ..long time.. WO and Rails dev here…
. Arrived here from a google search; just had to drop something. Have a good day! JTC
p.s. Personally I almost despise rails at this stage
p.p.s The above goes for pretty much all web frameworks (except wo
J27 August 08 at 10:39 am
So when is the Rails Apple store going live again? Just a ..long time.. WO and Rails dev here…
. Arrived here from a google search; just had to drop something. Have a good day! JTC
p.s. Personally I almost despise rails at this stage
p.p.s The above goes for pretty much all web frameworks (except wo
J27 August 08 at 2:39 pm
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