What's New in WebObjects 4.0

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"Serverless" Applications

WebObjects 4.0 applications can receive HTTP requests directly. Previously, a web server had to be running to receive HTTP requests and to forward them through the WebObjects adaptor.

To run a WebObjects application when no HTTP server is present, you simply specify the number of the port where the application should receive requests using the WOPort option. By default, WOPort is -1, which assigns an arbitrary high port number to the application. Thus, if you specify no port number at all, you can still run your application without a web server.

This new feature has several advantages:

You can debug applications on a machine that doesn't have a web server present.
You don't have to install project directories under the document root to test them.
Running without an HTTP server uses less memory on your development machine.
The WebObjects example applications no longer need to be installed under the web server's document root. Instead they are installed under Developer/Examples/WebObjects.

Note that if you do want to use a web server to test WebObjects examples, you can still do so. Before you do, do a "make install" to install the example's web server resources (such as image files and Java client-side classes) in the document root, just as you do when installing a WebObjects application. If you put your application in a directory other than "WebObjects" under your document root, set the WOApplicationBaseURL option to the .woa directory's path relative to the document root (WOApplicationBaseURL is set to /WebObjects by default). If you don't perform these steps, the web server won't be able to find web server resources; when you run the application, you'll see broken images, and client-side classes won't be loaded. (See Rapid Turnaround Mode for more on developing with and without a web server.)

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