Using WebObjects at web-scale with Kubernetes and Firebase

Obviously the title is click-bait. I’m not at web-scale; I’m still developing my product. And I don’t use WebObjects. Except that I do. Read on. I’m using GNUstepWeb, the WebObjects 4.5-compatible web application framework from GNUstep. That lets me use Objective-C as the implementation language; I like me some Java, as used in WebObjects 5.x and the community’s Project WOnder, but I love me some Objective-C. The traditional way to deploy GSW apps is with apache2, using the mod_gsw module that GSW provides. You give it a configuration file that tells it where to find the app executable and how many instances to launch, and it takes care of running them and routing requests to them in a roughly load-balanced way (typically round-robin). That approach works well—I had a website up for years that ran a single GSW instance behind apache2 and only ever restarted it for kernel updates and code changes—but has its limitations. There’s no GSW version of WOMonitor—the WebObjects deployment,…