(newbie) WO development sans WOBuilder
(newbie) WO development sans WOBuilder
- Subject: (newbie) WO development sans WOBuilder
- From: James Tolchard <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 23:14:28 +1200
Hi list
I am new here; both to this list, and to WO development in general.
Those of you who are also Mac OS X Server geeks may have seen me kicking
around on the email@hidden list (although not so much
recently... too much WO goodness to digest!).
I have downloaded the 30-day trial of WebObjects, and am using the trial
period to convince myself and my bosses that WO is going to offer the
best development and deployment environment for a fairly substantial
upcoming inhouse development project.
So far, I am really liking what I see, and imagine I will be purchasing
the full copy of WebObjects Developer at the end of my trial period.
While I'm new to WO and the EOF, I am quite familiar with relational
database theory and object-oriented development in general. I am also a
moderately experienced Cocoa developer, and have done a lot of web
development with PHP and MySQL. Having these skills, I think, has given
me a decent headstart down the WebObjects path, and I am finding the
learning to be fairly easy-going so far (I'm learning Java as I go, but
as I already know C this isn't proving particularly hard).
My biggest qualm so far (and I don't know how pervasive this opinion
is... perhaps I am just picky) is with WOBuilder. I find it to be quite
dated, both in terms of the HTML features that are supported by its
WYSIWYG editor, and in terms of the yukky code it generates. Its
validation can also be a little silly, for example complaining about an
unbalanced tag pair, which isn't actually unbalanced at all because the
"unbalancing" tag actually appears within a WOConditional. On top of
this, with complex pages WOBuilder tends to become a little sluggish (at
least in my limited experience, but perhaps this is just an issue with
my installation of it).
To be honest, I am already starting to find it easier to do my WO
development without the "help" of WOBuilder (admittedly I am still using
it to create the .api files for my reusable components, but once I
master how .api files work I think I will be WOBuilder-free).
I guess my questions are these: how many people do their WO development
without using WOBuilder at all? Can people recommend any tools or
strategies that they find handy in doing this? My development system is
a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz running Panther and WO5.2.3 (the trial version,
for now). I currently use BBEdit as an external editor for all my source
(I invoke it from XCode to edit my .java, .html and .wod files). I'd
love a simple .wod editing tool which knows all the bindings for the
standard elements and lets me set them using a simple table interface
(like the binding inspector of WOBuilder, but without any of the WYSIWYG
capabilities that program provides). Does such a beast exist?
I'm also a little worried, to say the least, about some of the
sky-is-falling, WebObjects-is-dying, flee-while-you-still-can comments I
see on the list. Without reopening any cans of worms, is this issue
something I am going to have to carefully consider before committing to
a purchase of WO, or just a little scaremongering/overreaction?
WebObjects (as an environment, I'm not referring to the development
tools) would appear, upon cursory inspection, to kick ass. It would be a
real shame to lose this one to Apple marketing apathy.
Lastly, I really love the idea of the WO advocacy/info site that is
currently being discussed on this list. I am keen to help out in any way
I can with this, so I'll keep an eye on the relevant threads and put in
my 2c when the chance arises.
I'd be interested in any and all replies to my above rantings, privately
or on-list as you feel appropriate :-)
Cheers
James
--
James Tolchard
ICT Services
Christ's College Canterbury
DDI: +64-3-364-6806
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
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