Chapter 7. Building web apps with Dashcode
This chapter covers
- Introducing the Dashcode development environment
- Programming simple iPhone web apps with Dashcode
- Integrating Dashcode with existing libraries
Thus far, we’ve talked about a lot of great programming libraries that you can use to create versatile and beautiful web apps for use on the iPhone. The WebKit, iUI, and Canvas each offered different ways to program your web pages.
Although we’ve looked at several different libraries, we haven’t concerned ourselves at all with the tools that you use to construct your web apps. You might be building your pages with Emacs or Adobe GoLive. You might be testing them out with Firefox or Opera. A variety of tools could be used for any of these tasks, but in this and the next chapter we’re going to suggest some options that we think are particularly effective. We’ll begin in this chapter with a development environment that allows you to create web pages specifically for the iPhone: Dashcode.
We’re going to give you plenty of information on Dashcode here. We’ll start off with an introductory look at the program and its parts. Then we’ll give some specific advice on using several of the objects and templates that Dashcode provides. Finally, we’ll examine how Dashcode interrelates with the libraries that you’ve worked with over the course of the last three chapters.