My son turns 14 this month, but we still have bedtime stories. Currently, the bedtime story is Simon Singh's The Code Book. While reading the description of the Vigenére cipher, I started to think about how I'd code up an implementation, and that led to my first webOS application. Cipher Suite is a small collection of classic ciphers, and is currently in the Palm beta feed. Hopefully a few people will give it a try and let me know if it sets their phone on fire or drowns some kittens or anything. Having gotten it that far, I thought I'd share a little bit about how the app was developed.

Development Environment

I don't love Eclipse, so I was excited when Palm announced Ares. Ares combines most of the tools you need for webOS development in a simple, browser-based IDE. Built-in JSLint support is awesome. Viewing logs while an app is running is simple. The editor and debugger are surprisingly capable. Source control integration is a great feature.

The visual designer, though possibly the most visible feature of Ares, wasn't that helpful for me. There's just not enough documentation to figure out how to accomplish what I want. The developer site has just barely enough documentation to build an app in the "traditional" Mojo way, let alone translating from Mojo to the Ares designer. The Ares presentation from Developer Days was hugely disappointing. So I just ended up creating a regular Mojo application instead, which worked just fine. It would be nice if you could choose up front which style of app to develop, and have the "New Scene" menu item either create an HTML scene or an Ares "chrome" scene as appropriate.

Source Control

Even though Ares keeps your code in the cloud, it's still a good idea to use source control for change tracking. I looked at a bunch of online Subversion hosts, and ended up picking Unfuddle. It's free, which is a big factor for a hobby project, and has worked reasonably well. It took me a little while to realize that adding a new project file in Ares does not add it to source control automatically -- you have to do that as a separate step.

Unit Testing

Another benefit of my Subversion repository was that I could work on my project outside of Ares and still keep everything organized. The main thing I found missing in Ares was a built-in way to do unit tests, so I took care of those on right on my PC. I used the Jasime JavaScript unit test framework, running the tests from a local "runner" HTML file within Firefox so that I could step through any failing tests using the Firebug debugger.

Summary

Learning to develop for webOS definitely took some effort, but now as I'm going through the same learning process for iOS, I realize that writing code in JavaScript and building views in HTML provides for a gentler learning curve than Objective-C and Cocoa. I started my professional development career as a C programmer, but the merger with Small Talk makes Objective-C an odd beast.

Cipher Suite is kind of a niche application, but hopefully it will be fun or useful to a few people. It took a lot of spare-time hours over several months to put it together, but I wanted to do my small part to support the great webOS community.