Dashcode, Dashcode, Dashcoding away

Posted: January 10, 2011 | | Categories: Mobile Development

I spent some time over the holidays building some sample applications for my Lotusphere presentation. I finally got the time to spend some quality time with Dashcode and build a couple of applications that get their data from a Domino server. After some trials and tribulations I was finally able to get it to work - woohoo!

Dashcode is cool and now that most of the major smartphone players are all using the WebKit browser, applications written in Dashcode should (and I'm saying should - I haven't tested this yet) work on devices besides the iPhone and iPad. One of the things I learned while teaching myself Dashcode is that the documentation available from Apple is pretty horrible. I really struggled to learn how to do some of the things I wanted to do. Dashcode is so good at pointing to a data source and building a complete application that talks to the data source that Apple apparently decided it wasn't worth it to document any of the other aspects of the program. Disappointing.

Until recently there haven't been any books written about Dashcode. There were some that mentioned Dashcode, but none that were truly about Dashcode. Fortunately there's a new Dummies book on Dashcode. I ordered a copy and have been reading through it. I'm hoping I can find the time to finish it by Lotusphere, perhaps I'll enhance my demos a little bit and show a more sophisticated application than I originally planned. One of the things I'm planning for my Lotusphere session is to try to build a Dashcode application for Domino in less than a minute.  I'm going to see if I can quickly build the app while someone times me then I'll go back and show the complete, unhurried steps in the process. It will be fun.

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