Screencasts

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.

WO Wideos

Seems like video is the new black in the WO community this week with the Ajax.framework from Project Wonder taking front billing.

Mike Schrag has posted a short video showing how to create and Ajaxify a new WebObjects app demonstrating some of the new features coming to WOLips.

John Larson has posted a YouTube video of some of the stuff he’s done leveraging the Ajax.framework.

Migration to Velocity EOGenerator Complete

With the release of Leopard, I was saddened to learn that we’d lost the use of EOGenerator in the resulting tools deprecations. Thankfully, a couple of major competitors filling that role quickly arose.

I’d mentioned JavaEOGenerator before but after working with it for a bit I decided to go with the Velocity based EOGenerator (veogen) built into WOLips.

I’m happy to report that as of WOLips build 3.3.4778 all of the pieces are in place in the veogen engine to duplicate my existing EOGenerator templates (the last missing bit was the named and typed bindings for fetch specs).

Veogen works very well. It is a lot faster than the old EOGenerator and I didn’t find the template language difficult to figure out.

For those moving to veogen, the built in templates are pretty comprehensive but if you feel the need to customize, there are a number of templates on the wiki to help get you started. The wiki also contains a fairly comprehensive list of the available bindings here.

Go forth and generate.