Bruce started the training off with an overview of what web apps are, including a warning that he would be lying to us. Not to be alarmed - this is lying in the sense of making some things simpler than they really are so they're understandable.
Key things to know about web apps and specifically NetTalk apps:
- server and browser are disconnected
- one EXE, multiple users
- server is written in Clarion
- client is written in JavaScript
- appearance is handled by CSS
- uses HTML/HTML5 (HTML5 isn't an accepted spec yet but many browsers have implemented many of the HTML5 features)
- the app you ship is the web server - there is no external web server requirement (e.g. IIS, Apache)
- the visual designer is gone
- deciding what the app looks like comes at the end, and you can style the whole app at once, e.g. make all browses look the same way
- this freaks a lot of people out
- it's actually much much better to do the visual design at the end - it's less work
- main 4(5) browsers supported
- IE
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Safari
- Opera too
- start thinking about procedures in a NetTalk app as event handlers
- you can't have local variables (but there's a way to get around that)
Bruce then whipped up a new app using the NetTalk wizard.
You can use localhost. Bruce also mentioned setting up your own names for IP addresses - the file you need for this is found under %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
More coming later on this page...