Get Out and WO

Update

So, I haven't posted much lately, but that doesn't mean nothing has been going on.

I was working my way through the Head Start Java book and had made it through about five chapters when an interesting thing happened. I got an e-mail out of the blue one night from a guy who is a regular poster to the WO lists. He had found this blog, was intrigued by what I had written so far, and wanted to know if I needed any help. We got to "talking", in e-mail, and he ended up offering to be my WO "mentor". Talk about a bolt of good luck landing in my lap!

I'm going to refer to this guy by the code-name of Griffin. Because he is well known on the lists, I don't want to expose him to grief by giving his real name and having other newbies flocking to him asking for help. Since he made his original offer he has taken on a big consulting job and doesn't really even have enough free time for me, though he is graciously insisting that he wants to keep helping out. Fortunately I've been so busy I haven't bothered him with much anyway.

Griffin suggested that the java book I was reading probably contains a lot of stuff I don't really need to know right now. He suggested reading Apple's Java for WO Developers doc instead, which I'm most of the way through.

Our next task is to work through the Ravi Mendis book, step by step. I attempted this once before but gave up somewhere in chapter 3. I had run into trouble with some of the exercises, which seemed to contain errors, and finally got frustrated enough to give up. I had found other people posting about the same problems, but not many solutions.

The plan is that Griffin and I will figure out what the real "bugs" are in the book, and what are just misleading things that trick the newbie developer into going down the wrong path. And then I'll post about them here.

We'll be using WO 5.3.1 for this adventure. I had hoped to stick with 5.2.4 until Apple got more of the bugs worked out, but I don't have an install code for it and Apple isn't posting the "trial" codes anymore, so I just could not get it to work. Griffin updated his development environment to match mine, which is a bit humbling and scary since he is doing actual production work with his setup! I hope this does not prove to be a liability for him...

What's the verdict on 5.3.1?

I still haven't installed WO on my new iMac, but I need to do that soon.  I was planning to stick with XCode 2.0 and WO 5.2.4, not wanting to have 5.3's bugginess adding to my confusion.  But now that there is another point release out, maybe I should take the plunge.  I've been watching discussion on the various lists but not seeing any definitive opinions;  some seem pleased with it and others not.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? :)

One down, a pile to go

I finished Using EOModeler the other day and moved on to the EO Programming Guide. I have to admit this stuff is pretty deadly boring, but Chuck recommends reading them before reading his book so I'm trying to plow through them.

Fortunately all of Apple's docs come in PDF, which I can put on my Treo and read via Adobe Reader for Palm. It's not perfect; graphics are often missing or too hard to read, but it works quite well overall. I am getting a lot more reading done than I would if I had to carry a book or printout around with me. I don't sit down and read at home very much, and when I do I reserve that for Head First Java which I can't get in PDF form (and which requires a pencil and a surface to write on at the end of each chapter).

A summary of my work so far

So far I have completed the following:

• Read Apple's WebObjects Overview
• Read and worked through Apple's Web Applications tutorial
• Attempted to work through the examples in Josh Marker's book Webobjects for Mac OS X and Ravi Mendis' WebObjects Developer's Guide, but got frustrated with inconsistencies, typos, etc and gave up

I had decided to just launch into building a simple app as my own tutorial, but then we decided to move cross-country and the whole thing got put on hold.

Now that I'm back, I'm reading Apple's Using EOModeler, which I can't find online at the moment, and slowly working my way through Head First Java.  After that I plan to read Apple's WebObjects Enterprise Objects Programming Guide and Apple's Java for WebObjects Developers, and then Chuck and Sacha's book Practical WebObjects. 

At some point in there, probably at the same time as I'm diving in to Practical WO, I'll also get started building some sort of real-life app.

Any comments/suggestions for improvement?
 

Using Eclipse and Perforce

After reading a lot about Subversion I decided that it still sounded a bit too much like CVS for my tastes, and decided to give Perforce a serious try.  I've played with it before, but never tried to use it for anything productive.

I happened to be evaluating a package that provides Eclipse project files (Alfresco) so I decided to see if I could not only download the source and get it to build, but to get it checked into Perforce and see if I could access it via the Eclipse P4 plugin.  Since I was dealing with three pieces, all new to me, this was a lot harder than it sounds.

I thought I kept notes on the Perforce install/setup process, but I can't find them now.  I'll try to remember to document it here next time I do it.  I have the server on one system and client on my desktop, so it was a tad more complicated than the all-in-one case.

The really hard part was getting things set up so that the P4 plugin worked correctly.  I ended up with the following notes:

• create local client workspace in Perforce and update to populate it with files (I'm using P4V to do this)
• fire up Eclipse and create it's workspace somewhere else
• do File->Import->Existing Projects into Workspace to import files from Perforce workspace
• do Right Click->Team->Share Project on each project (because this source base contains multiple projects)

The thing that really threw me was that you can also go into the Perforce view in Eclipse and there is an import option there too, but it does not recognize the .project files that the Eclipse import does and so you end up with a "dead" project you can't do anything with.  It took getting help from both Perforce support and the P4 mailing list to straighten this out, but now that I know the magic steps it works fine.

This is all probably an academic exercise as I don't actually think we are going to use Alfresco for anything (they seem to be a tad unclear on what being an Open Source project actually means) and the direction Apple has taken with tying the WO development tools to XCode may mean I won't be able to use Eclipse anyway, but it was educational nonetheless.

Why WebObjects?

It's a fair question.  WO has been around for a while but has never exactly caught on like wildfire.  Apple used to charge $50,000 for a server license, then dropped the price to $699 in 2001 (or so).  It seems to be human nature to think that when something is that cheap (by comparison) it must be no good, like they are trying to unload last week's spoiled software or something.  And with the latest release (5.3) it is now effectively free, though you do have to buy an OS X Server license to deploy, which costs about $499.  It is now in that grey area where those who prefer commercial software think it is too cheap, but those who favor Open Source software won't touch it because it's not free or open source.  It's a tough place to be.

Also, coming from the frame of reference I do, which is that of an Open Source toolkit written in Tcl, the words "Java" and "Application Server" are supposed to send me running away screaming, or so I'm told.  And a database abstraction layer that doesn't let you write your own SQL optimized for each database is something akin to godlessness, I fear.  But you know, once you start looking into it there are some pretty cool things about this development environment.

Instead of trying to explain what WO is and why one should use it, I'm going to send you to a couple of excellent references:

First, the WO section of Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsh's blog, which is excellent even though some of the articles are over 4 years old now.

Second, Wikipedia's page on WebObjects.  It's not complete but what's there looks pretty good to my newbie eyes.

My interest in it is due to our being a small shop with limited resources, and WO promising to allow a single developer or small team to be very productive.  That is, of course, after one ascends the learning curve, which looks sort of like one of those skateboard ramps, steep and intimidating.  I know I can do it, if I can just carve enough time out of my day to spend time on it on a consistent basis.

Introduction

For the last year or so this blog has been run in WordPress on my own company's servers.  But I've never been all that thrilled with WordPress and didn't want to be bothered with installing anything else, so I decided to go the hosted route.  I moved the URL to this site (obviously!) but the old one is still running under http://janine.furfly.net/wordpress, and will probably stay there at least until what little info it contains is well and truly out of date.

So what exactly does "Get Out and WO" mean?  Well, for the last couple of years I've been trying to learn WebObjects, aka WO.  Before you write me off as a loser for taking so long, the problem is not that it's so hard, though it is moderately complicated;  the problem is that my day job keeps me so busy that I only have time to dabble in it once in a while and that's just not good enough to make progress with any technical endeavor.

This site's relaunch signals my intention to put a bit more effort into this, and since there is a serious lack of good info on WO for newbies I intend to document my progress, both the triumphs and the "I can't believe I was so stupid" moments we all have from time to time.

(the lack of good newbie info will be remedied when Chuck and Sacha's book comes out next year, but for the moment us WO newbies can use all the help we can get)

I've had a lot of trouble with comment spam on the old site, and I'm sure the idiot will follow me here.  I've set comment authentication to optional in hopes that my having changed blog software will throw off the 'bot, but I may have to change to requiring you to have a Typepad account to post comments.  I'll post if that happens.  I'll try to avoid it;  I really don't want to have to make people go to that much trouble.