Legacy WebObjects tools for Leopard

Still using Tiger for your WebObjects development? Upgraded from Leopard to Tiger just so you could use the old tools? Doing your WebObjects development on a second Mac running Tiger? Using the new tools but cursing at them every day?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you need WOCompatibility.

What is it?

It's really just a simple hack. The reason the tools don't work on Leopard is that Apple finally removed some code that basically predates OS X. All of their other projects have been updated to use different methods but the WebObjects tools have been more or less happily thinking they're still on a NeXT machine.

How do I use it?

The details are explained in the included README at the top of the source tree. I have made every effort to make this as simple as possible to build. You should be able to build the Xcode project (note: use the Debug configuration since the woroot-fixup.sh expects this) then run the three scripts in order (taking care to use sudo for the first two). The first one unpacks some packages off of the mounted Xcode 2.5 dmg into /tmp/WebObjectsLegacyDevelopment.dst. The second one installs the libraries built by the Xcode project into that root and makes a few fixups to the Apple-provided binaries. The third one packages it all up into /tmp/WebObjectsLegacyDevelopment.pkg so you can just open it and install it like anything else.

I'd distribute the package myself except I'm not aware of Apple giving me the rights to do this.

Where do I get it?

Right here. Download WOCompatibility-r18.tar.gz.

Older version: WOCompatibility-r16.tar.gz.

Any other words?

Yes. Dear Apple, Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

As you can see I made these tools run without doing anything particularly difficult. Would it have really broken the bank to have someone rebuild these for Leopard?

Who's responsible for this madness?

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dave Elliott, a self-employed software developer. I did some very critical business apps where I was last employed and left to take on more interesting work.

Notably I am the author of the wxCocoa port of the wxWidgets toolkit. Because Carbon is not available in 64-bit mode, wxWidgets is the only cross-platform toolkit with a port that works on 64-bit Leopard. On behalf of Software 2000 Ltd. I was able to improve the port to make it suitable for an upcoming product.

I've also recently had my hand in another very important program but I cannot yet tell you, dear public reader, what that is.

If you want you might check out the rest of my site. Sorry about the looks. I'll put something together eventually.