Author: david

Connection Dictionary Twiddling – Part 2

Posted on by david

I wrote about using Project Wonder’s ERXConfigurationManager to ‘twiddle’ your model connection dictionary settings here.

I only listed the global properties, but there are per model properties as well. Unfortunately the JDBC settings are not very well documented. So, to google index my brain, here are my notes: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the fixJDBCDictionary method in ERXModelGroup – you can read the source if you want to know all the values – here is a (MySQL) example with the most common ones:

  • MyModelName.URL=jdbc:mysql://localhost/my_dbname?capitalize…etc
  • MyModelName.DBUser=db_user
  • MyModelName.DBPassword=db_password
  • MyModelName.DBDriver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

WOWODC 2008 Press

Posted on by david

Pascal sent out the WOWODC press release earlier this week and we’ve seen the notice popping up on various sites all week. The best so far has got to be the post on ars technica:

“You think it’s hard being a Mac IT guy? Try being a WebObjects developer. Despite its ease of use, elegance, ridiculously low price, and variety of supported runtime environments, Apple’s web application framework gets next to no respect…”

WOWODC 2008

Posted on by david

Mark your calendar! WOWODC 2008 WOCommunity.org‘s second annual WebObjects developers conference is taking place the weekend before WWDC at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco.

Pascal Robert (who has done an amazing job pulling this all together) tells me we have an incredible roster of presenters and sessions lined up for the this year. If last years conference is anything to go by, it should be a rip-roaring good time.

Tickets are available here

Disclaimer: I am a member of the WOCommunity.org steering committee.

New Screencast

Posted on by david

WO/ProjectWonder/WOLips – Part 2

I just completed part 2 of the WO/Wonder/WOLips series. This episode introduces:

  • Reusable components
  • Importing files into your project
  • DirectActions
  • Modeling relationships
  • Updating a db schema with Migrations

It should be in available in WebObjects Podcasts on iTunes, from the WOCommunity site, or direct from my .mac account here.

Resources

Source of the completed project.

As always, comments and suggestions welcome.

Screencasts

Posted on by david

I’ve been playing with the very cool ScreenFlow from vara software this week… Did I mention that it was very cool?

Anyway, I put together a couple of introductory screencasts on using WebObjects and WOLips. They can both be found in the WebObjects Podcasts on iTMS or from the WOCommunity site.

HelloWorld

The first is a short HelloWorld tutorial that introduces:

  • Launching Eclipse/WOLips for the first time
  • Creating a new WebObjects project
  • Project folder structure
  • Running the application
  • Modifying the application run settings
  • Editing components

Direct link from my .mac account here.

WO/ProjectWonder/WOLips

The second is a more advanced WO/Wonder/WOLips tutorial that introduces:

  • Database setup using Wonder’s Migrations (NOTE: I use WO 5.3 on Leopard – Migrations are broken in WO 5.4)
  • Inline bindings
  • WOLips’ Add Action, and Add Key dialogs
  • EOGeneration using the Wonder Velocity Template
  • ERXKey and chainable qualifiers

Direct link from my .mac account here.

Resources

Login form mockup.

Source of the completed project.

Notes:

The response from the WO lists has been very positive, so thank you everyone.

Lachlan Deck asked:

Probably helpful to explain why you’re making the ivars public (i.e., in the absence of getter/setters)

My general thoughts on this are:

If –

  • The ivars are only used by the component’s bindings (ie WORepetition item bindings)
  • Are used by bindings and are set in only one action or method in the component
  • Are never exposed by the api

Then I usually feel OK accessing them directly. If I need to expose the variable via the components API or I need to set the ivars value multiple places in the component then I will make the ivar private and wrap it with accessors.

Comments and suggestions welcome.