HelloWorld.woa

A real, honest-to-goodness Apple WebObjects 5.4.3 application running in a Docker container. Not a simulation. Not a tribute band. The actual JAR files, the actual NSBundle lookup, the actual .wo template files — all of it, running on your laptop in the year of our lord 2026.

What even is WebObjects?

WebObjects was Apple's (and originally NeXT's) enterprise Java web framework from the late 1990s. Before Rails, before Django, before Spring MVC, there was WebObjects — and it was genuinely ahead of its time. It had object-relational mapping, component-based HTML templates with two-way KVC bindings, and a session management system that would look familiar to anyone who's used modern frameworks.

Apple used it to power the Apple Store and iTunes Store for years. Then they quietly discontinued it around 2008. The JARs live on, preserved by the WOCommunity folks, and apparently they still run just fine on Java 11.

This project proves it.

What's in here

• A HelloWorld.woa that serves a real WebObjects response with live session IDs and WO headers
• A classic guestbook backed by a real database, with server-side form validation, persistent entries, and a visitor counter — all styled to match the Mac OS X Panther Aqua aesthetic — plus graceful session expiry handling that redirects back to the main page with a warning instead of WO's raw error screen
• A live app stats page surfacing real JVM internals: heap usage with a color-coded progress bar, GC collector name and pause time, loaded class count, thread counts, system load average, WebObjects session tracking, and a git revision link back to the exact commit
• A Docker Compose setup so the whole thing spins up with one command

Running it

You need Docker. That's it.

GIT_REVISION=$(git rev-parse HEAD) docker compose up --build -d

Then open http://localhost:1085. Tomcat redirects you straight to HelloWorld.woa.

Port 1085 is the traditional default WebObjects port — same as the old days.

Want to watch the WO startup logs? They're glorious:

docker compose logs -f

To stop:

docker compose down

The stack

Layer	Technology	Vibe
Web framework	Apple WebObjects 5.4.3	1999
App server	Tomcat 8.5	2016
Database	HSQLDB 2.7	Early 2000s Java apps
Build	Maven 3.9	Still going strong
Runtime	Java 11	The LTS era
Container	Docker	Modern enough

The database is HSQLDB — a pure-Java embedded database that was everywhere in early-2000s Java enterprise apps. No separate container, no service to manage; it just writes files to ./data/guestbook/ and persists across restarts.

The WebObjects JARs are vendored directly in lib/ as a Maven file-based local repository. The build has no dependency on WOCommunity or any external Maven repo beyond Central — it works air-gapped.

🏆 We tried FrontBase for maximum retro points. FrontBase's website is running a broken WebObjects app. The JDBC driver appears to have been erased from the internet. The x86 Docker image crashes during initialization on Apple Silicon. FrontBase wins the award for most retro by actually being inaccessible.

The guestbook

The real highlight. Sign it.

http://localhost:1085/WebObjects/HelloWorld.woa → click the guestbook link.

Entries persist in ./data/guestbook/ (bind-mounted into the container), so your messages survive restarts and you can inspect or back up the raw HSQLDB files any time. Just like a real 1999 guestbook server that somehow never gets rebooted.

The stats page

Click View App Stats on the main page to see a live dashboard pulled straight from the JVM management beans and WebObjects internals — uptime, heap usage, GC pause time, loaded class count, thread counts, system load average, session tracking, and a clickable git revision link to the exact GitHub commit the image was built from. It's the kind of thing that would have lived behind a password-protected /admin link in 2003.

http://localhost:1085/WebObjects/HelloWorld.woa → click View App Stats.

How it actually works

WebObjects in servlet mode is not simple to set up. The framework has specific expectations:

• It runs in WOROOT mode, where it looks for a .woa filesystem bundle at /opt/woapps/HelloWorld.woa/. The bundle has to exist with Contents/Resources/<ComponentName>.wo/ directories for template lookup to work.
• The WOClasspath in web.xml must be newline-separated. The tokenizer uses \r\n as its delimiter, not :. A colon-separated path on Linux is treated as one giant token and the whole thing breaks.
• Application classes have to be in WEB-INF/lib/HelloWorld.jar (for the servlet classloader) AND in the .woa bundle path (for bundle detection). Two copies, two purposes.

It took a while to figure all this out. The CLAUDE.md has the gory details if you want them.

🤔 Curious about those wild-looking URLs (/wo/qatqoDY6ea29X0I4B1Jodw/0.7)? DEMYSTIFYING_WEBOBJECTS_URLS.md breaks down every segment.

Project structure

src/main/java/
  Application.java        WO application entry point; tracks session count
  Main.java               Default page component; shows session expiry warning
  GuestbookPage.java      Guestbook component (form + validation + entry list)
  GuestbookDB.java        HSQLDB data access (singleton)
  GuestbookEntry.java     Data bean
  StatsPage.java          Live stats component (JVM + WO + guestbook metrics)

src/main/resources/
  Main.wo/                Hello World template + bindings
  GuestbookPage.wo/       Guestbook template + bindings
  StatsPage.wo/           Stats dashboard template + bindings
  Properties              WO app config
  Info.plist              Bundle metadata

src/main/webapp/
  index.jsp               Redirects / → HelloWorld.woa
  WEB-INF/web.xml         Servlet config + WOClasspath

Dockerfile                Multi-stage: Maven build → Tomcat
docker-compose.yml        Single service, port 1085, bind-mounts ./data/guestbook
data/guestbook/           HSQLDB database files (gitignored, .keep tracks the dir)