This article in Wikipedia, Object-relational mapping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, makes interesting references to the history of NeXT objectoriented programming, Web Objects, and Apple.
It says NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework “provides the technology behind the company's e-commerce Web site, the .Mac services and the iTunes Music Store. Apple provides EOF in two implementations: the Objective-C implementation that comes with the Apple Developers Tools and the Pure Java implementation that comes in WebObjects 5.2. Inspired by EOF is the open source Apache Cayenne. Cayenne has similar goals to EOF and aims to meet the JPA standard.”