After a lot of posts on Hibernate, Spring, CAS and some other topics I'll start to blog on something new now.
Recently we got the task to develop a mobile application for our java based system. As I'm already quite a good Java programmer I decided to go for something new (at least for me) and take over the part of the iOS programming.
Of course when you decide to go mobile now you cannot just code for the iOS platform, but you'll have to consider also Android and slowly also the Windows Mobile 7 (and 8) platform. Despite that it would be nice to develop on every platform in parallel we are quite limited in time and man power, so we will focus now just on iOS and Android whereas the later will be developed by a workmate (unfortunately I could not take over everything :-)
Due to this decisions you'll probably find most of the future posts on iOS related topics, however if we'll find some fancy solution to a common Android problem I'll post it too.
Till now the most funny thing that I can post regards my preparation or better my learning of the Objective C language and my experience in the first week. As I know already since last week that I'll go to work on iOS I was looking for good tutorials and similar stuff that simplifies the first steps in a new coding language.
To make a long story short; All you'll need to jump into the topic is some time to watch this tutorial that you'll find in iTunes iPad and iPhone Application Development (HD) by Paul Hegarty. As you're starting to develop for this platform you probably have already an iPad on which you can watch it from you sofa or your happy place or wherever you like.
Of course its not the first new language that I learn (beside Java I know C/C++ which by the way makes it really simple to understand Objective-C, Python, Cobol, Pl/1 and some others) so its not that difficult for me to switch context, however after one week of coding my App is already able to fetch data from our server via Rest, navigate through various layers (like a tree structure) al the way down to the content and sow that one into a WebView container. And all this already for iPhone and iPad, which should give you an impression on how good the Stanford tutorial really is.
So, as this post is just intended as a sort of introduction to my new studies I'll stop here, but stay tuned for new posts on how to structure your MVC-iOS application, how to communicate from you iOS app via REST to a server and many other intresting topics.
