Adventures in iOS Land – Day 1+

One-calendar-day1My first day digging into Titanium didn’t quite turn out like I had planned. Setting up XCode (once I received by Apple Developer Program credentials) and Titanium Studion was very straight-forward. I am using Xcode 4.2 and Titanium Studio 1.0.7. I also installed the Android SDK. The help and SDK installers seem to have improved since I tried installing Titanium on Windows XP.

Appcelerator has done a great job preparing tutorials and videos in what they call AppU. Three starter videos are provided upon installation: Preparing for Mobile Development, Getting Started with the Development Environment and Sample Projects.

My first project is a business app. I’ve already created the basic prototype using jQuery Mobile. You can find it here. This app will communicate with a .NET XML SOAP web service running on a Windows Server. Since we are developing mobile apps to facilitate business management systems, it is key that the app work with a web service supporting Windows business applications. Given this backdrop, it became apparent that I needed to bone up on SOAP, Javascript and jQuery.

I bought the jQuery Cookbook some time ago, but hadn’t cracked the cover until recently. I started working through the basic examples to get an understanding of jQuery and Javascript basics. You can find the tutorials here. I then started looking specifically at jQuery client side examples using AJAX to communicate with an XML SOAP web service. Here are some that were helpful to me:

Posting XML SOAP Requests with jQuery

Using AJAX with jQuery Mobile

Creating a Javascript Soap Client

Even though I’ve made much less progress that I had hoped, I’ve learned a lot about jQuery and SOAP. On our Windows server I am using a slick testing environment called SoapUI. Blogger Jason Cohen is involved in this project and I’d like to give him a big shout out for not only helping to create a great tool, but for writing some great posts on the business of software.