Dashcode development for iPhone resources

Question

I've been developing web applications and iPhone applications for years. Now I want to create a web application oriented to the iPhone browser.

I willing to use Dashcode, since it seams to have tons of cool features that make my web app look like an native iPhone app.

The problem I face is twofold: On one side I don't know it Dashcode development will allow me to do all I want (session control, runtime datasources, etc); on the other side I'm having a hard time finding good documentation, tutorials and books on Dashcode programing for the iPhone. Looks like 90% of the links out there are for Dashcode widgets.

Can you advise me on the best resources to learn Dashcode (for mobile Safari) programming?

Thanks Gonso

Answer 1

There is very little on Dashcode other then the Apple Developer site site which has quite a lot of Dashcode material to a reasonable level.

Ypu need to remember that Dashcode is HTML, CSS and Javascript. Anything you can do with these you can do in Dashcode.

Then you can make system calls to the Mac and there is a wealth of tools and code snippets in the library provided and you can tap into a lot of the underlying Apple classes that come with development tools to make things happen.

You can alos look at the work of others by downloading a widget that has features you may want to emulate and then importing it to Dashcode at which point you will have the whole application there to inspect and reverse engineer.

Being a bit more specific, you cannot have sessions (widgets) but you can have user preferences. these will allow you to store information that will outlast reboots, think of them as cookies.

And you can have datassources which can be external stores, xml, sqlite etc. But they will have to be connectable to either via the datassources mechanisms or JavaScript.

Any books currently on the market that have "Dashcode" in them are not worth buying as they do not cover anything like the level Apple documentation and merely mention it in passing.