The main source of Objective-C frameworks is Steve Jobs and his team. They started to use this language since they were selling the NeXT machine. When NeXT buys Apple (for a negative amount of money ;^) they recompiled the operating system OpenStep to run into Apple's hardware; since then, it is know as Mac OS X. These are all old news. One more: Java becomes fashioned more or less in the same time — a bit before, to be more precise.
NeXT was forced to move one of its most valuable pieces of software, WebObjects, from Objective-C to Java; but they wanted to keep it "native" inside OS X... so, they coded the so called Java Bridge, a (never too nice, but useful) piece of software which allows to communicate the JVM and the Obj-C runtime. With this tool at hand it is possible to code (to develop) applications which have the beauty interfaces (and useful) frameworks of Cocoa (the front-end of OS X) and have also all the database connectivity developed for WebObjects, the so called Enterprise Objects Framework. The result: the best client/server apps in the market.
The bad news (well, not so new) is that Apple is giving up on the Java Bridge... this means that I will have to port all my code to use something else in order to provide nice and useful interfaces to my users, while keeping the database connectivity easy to manage... not an easy task, but it has to be done =:o(
