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Tutorial on Adding Undo to Your Cappuccino Application Published on ThinkVitaminNovember 13

ThinkVitamin.com is featuring an article by Francisco that goes through the process of adding undo/redo support to an existing application. It uses a “furniture layout” application as the model, and goes through all the steps necessary to make user actions undoable.

This is a great demonstration of one of the powerful built-in features in Cappuccino, and a good read for anyone building an application in Cappuccino. Undo support is one of those features that goes a long way in making your application more enjoyable to use, and customers will love you for it.

So go checkout the tutorial, then get started adding undo support to your own applications!

Getting Started With Cappuccino and Ruby on RailsNovember 11

Cappuccino is completely server agnostic, meaning Cappuccino applications can be served using any HTTP server (for example Apache, lighttpd, Microsoft IIS, etc) and can communicate with any server side technology over HTTP (Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, ASP, Java, CouchDB, etc). This lets you choose your server-side components based on whatever criteria is important to you (experience, existing infrastructure, etc).

That said, many people have asked for examples of using Cappuccino with various server side technologies, especially Ruby on Rails. Since Cappuccino is server agnostic, it turns out to be very simple to get started.

Setting Up a Project

The first step is to create your Rails project using the standard “rails appname” command:

rails appname cd appname

Then create a new Cappuccino project in a temporary directory, either using the “steam create” command, or by downloading the “Starter Package”. Move the contents of the Cappuccino project to the Rails application’s “public” directory. Here’s an example using “steam create” (which will overwrite the default index.html):

steam create temp mv temp/* public/. rmdir temp

That’s it! Start the Rails webserver using “script/server”. Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/ and you should see the “hello world” Cappuccino application.

Exposing the Data

This alone isn’t particularly interes

Web Directions NorthNovember 8

In February, we’ll be running a workshop at the Web Directions North conference in Denver. It will be a four hour workshop on getting started with Cappuccino and Objective-J.

Here’s a blurb about the workshop:

This workshop will get you started on building applications in Cappuccino and Objective-J. Attendees will not be expected to have any prior experience with these technologies, but some familiarity with JavaScript and Object Oriented concepts are recommended. By the end of the workshop you will be comfortable with Objective-J and have worked through the process of building a simple application in Cappuccino. You’ll be introduced to common patterns, the most used classes, and you’ll learn how to find new information as you need it.

If you’re interested in attending the conference, or even just the workshop, you can use this discount code: WDN09RB. This will get you $50 off, making the conference $745 before December 14th, or the standalone workshop $195.

Here’s some marketing content directly from Web Directions:

Web Directions is a highly focussed conference and workshops for web designers, developers, UX and ID designers, and other web professionals whose day to day job is building web sites and web applications. It features two dozen world class experts, with a

New Cappuccino Automatic Layout TutorialNovember 7

This new tutorial covers Cappuccino’s powerful system of automatic resizing and repositioning support for creating dynamic layouts easily and quickly.  Proper resizing behavior is an important part of polishing any application, so make sure to check it out!

Cappuccino Tools: “bake”October 29

In the final installment of the Cappuccino Tool article series (for now), we cover “bake”, an automatic deployment tool. Writing a Cappuccino application does not require using “bake”, but can help with more advanced deployments.

Introduction

“bake” is somewhat analogous to Capistrano, a deployment tool often used for deploying Ruby on Rails and other applications, but “bake” has several features specifically for deploying Cappuccino applications.

The basic idea behind “bake” is to assemble a complete deployable copy of your application by pulling the pieces from various places (Git, Subversion, and local or remote directories via rsync), building it, packing it up, and deploying it to your server(s).

One key feature of bake is the management of multiple deployments over time, which allows three things: atomic deployments, keeping your client side code (the Cappuccino application) synchronized with your server side code, and enabling aggressive caching on all your static resources (code, images, etc). We’ll see later this is done by putting all the new resources in place, then “swinging” a single file, the index.html with a <base> tag.

“Atomic deployments” means that the deployment is updated to the new version in a single operation, which is either successful or not, nothing in between. Every client loadi