Apple’s incredibly powerful and robust web application framework
There are a few things I skimmed over or skipped in my WOWODC D2W presentation (too much information, not enough time). One particular item may trip up a new D2W developer, it is an important setting that allows RuleModeler to communicate with WOLips and enables rapid turnaround when you edit rules during development.
Luckily there is a page in the wiki that details the steps you need to take.
I received a lot of very positive feedback about my Direct to Web (D2W) presentation at WOWODC West this year. A lot of it was along the lines of: “Wow D2W is very cool, it’s sad that everyone doesn’t know about it” Well, I agree, D2W is very cool, and everyone should know about it. So, I suggested to Pascal that we release the video for my D2W presentation for free.
The first half of the presentation has been available for a few weeks now but the second half was delayed, waiting for the processed audio.
Well, I’m very pleased to announce that the post-production work is now complete and both halves of the presentation are now available from the WOCommunity site (part 1, part 2) or from the WO podcast feed on iTunes.
Direct to Web is a phenomenally powerful but underused part of WebObjects. I hope these videos do a little to help it gain some wider recognition.
For those of you who would like to play along at home, the Movies framework and MySQL database dump I used in the presentation are available here:
Finally, I hope that these videos give you a sense of the quality and depth of the presentation at WOWODC West in general (they were uniformly awesome). If you found mine interesting, I’m sure you will enjoy the others. Pascal should have them available for sale shortly – or better yet – tickets are still available for WOWODC East in Montreal at the end of August.
Ramsey Gurley does a great job of explaining the D2W rules system (and why Project Wonder is invaluable) in this article on the wiki.
A highly recommended read.
Project Wonder’s ERExcelLook is a framework that leverages Direct To Web and the ExcelGenerator framework to easily generate Excel exports. I just finished a short screencast on adding it to an existing project. The topics covered are:
Links for the screencast:
I hope you enjoy it, let me know what you think.
Update: Dave Holt points out that you can specify the worksheet name by adding it in parenthesis as the first item in your displayPropertyKeys array. i.e:
(
"(WorksheetName)",
"title",
"dateReleased",
"category",
"studio.name"
)WOWDC 2009 West (held just before WWDC) was an outstanding success (and I’m not just saying that because I presented 🙂 ) We had a gathering of very knowledgeable and talented WO developers and the conversation over dinners and breaks was as illuminating and educational as the sessions themselves.
Pascal is working feverishly on hammering the videos into shape and working hard on planning WOWODC 2009 East to be held in Montreal late in August.
Our plan for WOWODC 2009 East is for a conference focused on getting novice WO developers up to speed on the tools and frameworks. The sessions we have planned should teach you how to setup and use the tools, understand the frameworks, and build your applications using the best practices around.
However, this year’s WOWODC West also made it clear that there is a lot of value for more advanced developers in simply being able to share their experience with one another. So we are thinking about adding a second track to WOWODC East. A second room for more advanced sessions, labs, and case studies.
For this to happen though, we will need your help. Are you interested in hanging out in Montreal with a bunch of other crazed WO developers? Would you be interested in hosting a lab, presenting a case study, or giving a session on a topic that is near and dear to your heart? Either way, please take a moment to fill out our latest survey (hosted by the kind folks at survs.com).
We also heard from several people that they didn’t know about WOWODC West and/or the other surveys we’ve run this year. If you know of any WebObjects developers who don’t follow the mailing lists or Twitter feeds (wowodc, wocommunity), or know about the WOCommunity organization, please spread the word!