Developing web application using Objective-C on FreeBSD

Question

I saw that the Clang 3.0 port includes Objective-C as a development language, and furthermore, I also found this port "libobjc2-1.6" (Replacement Objective-C runtime supporting Obj-C 2 features) and "ofc-0.8.1_5" (The Objective-C Foundation Classes library).

Let's say we are considering to use Objective-C on FreeBSD to develop a web-based application (vs. using Java and running it on Tomcat/Glassfish), how do we approach it?

Does Objective-C development actually work on FreeBSD (9.0)?

What are the things (frameworks/library) to download and install?

What IDE?

As I mentioned that let's say we intend to develop a web application, what are the library?/libraries (We also saw that there is "GNUstepWeb" - successor to WebObjects - is this the web library we should consider? Is this the ONLY ONE - what about other alternatives? Further, can GNUstep/GNUstepWeb compile under Clang 3.0 or make use of those Objective-C ports ("libobjc2-1.6" and "ofc-0.8.1_5") mentioned above? Are those ports relavant?

Has anyone successfully done a web application project development on FreeBSD using Objective-C (and deployed on FreeBSD)?

Note: Web-based applications means it takes in HTTP (RESTful) calls and talks to a database (for traditional and/or NoSQL databases).

Answer 1

There is http://cocotron.org, a port (more like re-write) of Apple's runtime for Objective-C.

I still could advice against using ObjC for web stack. I did that previously, and I must say that it involves a big chunk of pretty common code that you will need to implement for basic HTTP server functionality.

Also, Cocotron is not really that fast (as a runtime). It's ok for desktop applications, but web world is much more restrictive.