The best Web development framework of all time was WebObjects, which started at NeXT. It was basically Cocoa for the web. It was wonderful. When Apple bought NeXT they continued it for awhile and ported it to Java to try and make it more cross platform. That didn't really take, as it was a commercial product and despite lowering the price dramatically many times and loosening the licensing restrictions this was the point at which open source solutions like Ruby on Rails, despite being terrible in comparison really started to take off because they were free.
There was a great community around WebObjects and it's a shame that Apple didn't open source it in a timely fashion-- they could have changed things quite a bit.
It is still used in heavy production- for instance the iTunes store is a WebObjects Application as is, I believe, the App Store.
At the time Sun was working together with NeXT for having Objective-C in Solaris (before Oak became Java) and got their base ideas for J2EE from WebObjects.
There was a great community around WebObjects and it's a shame that Apple didn't open source it in a timely fashion-- they could have changed things quite a bit.
It is still used in heavy production- for instance the iTunes store is a WebObjects Application as is, I believe, the App Store.