WebObjects 5 in 15 Minutes

I believe the best way to learn WebObjects is to hire a good personal coach and work on a realistic project with him over your shoulder. However, I also understand that's not a realistic option for most of us.

Fortunately there's an alternative that's also rather effective: watching a pro use WebObjects to build an application. If the presenter is good about explaining what he is doing, a good understanding can be realized in relatively little time.

That's why groups like PSIG, CAWUG and Uniforum are a good return on investment -- you get to see technologies in action that don't otherwise leap off the printed or virtual page.

But meatspace presentations have a bunch of drawbacks as well. It's easy to get confused on a niggling point and lose sync with the presenter. Also, the presentation is typically a one-shot affair -- it won't be repeated. Finally, you might not be in the geographical area and/or have a conflicting engagement.

To address these issues, I'm going to try an experiment here. Using the awesome new SnapProX 2, I "filmed" the creation of a simple blog-style application using WebObjects:

WebObjects 5 in 15 minutes: Creating a Simple Weblog from Scratch (10.2 MB, streaming, you probably need QT6) [direct link]

As the name implies, the movie is just about 15 minutes long, and steps through creating the database, modeling the data, initializing the database, creating a project, defining the user interface, binding the UI to Java code, and reading and writing to the database.

If this goes over well, I may create a few more, covering more of WebObjects and perhaps some Cocoa topics.

Update: Here's the related Xcode project complete with EOModeler file.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004
12:00 AM