Here We Grow Again

We continue to grow and are looking for 11 great people to help us build the next generation of great applications – BAs, QAs and Developers wanted in wonderful Tampa, FL.

Click on the links below to view the job posting details on the Wolters Kluwer website.

Applications Developer (Desktop)

Senior Applications Developer (middle tier)

Applications Developer (Middle Tier)

Applications Developer (User Interface)

Applications Developer (Web)

Associate Business Analyst

Database Quality Control Engineer

Quality Assurance Engineer

Senior Business Analyst

Product Support Specialist

TeamMate Audit Software Training Consultant

 

You can access the Wolters Kluwer job search site here:

Wolters Kluwer Career Site

Be sure to select Florida as the State, Tampa as the city and click the Search button at the bottom. It is not necessary to login to search positions.

Environment

Let me first describe the environment I’m using:

Windows Vista desktop with Visual Studio 2010. IIS 7 with ASP.NET MVC3. Safari 5.x for testing HTML5 features such as offline cache and for emulating iPhone/iPod via user agent. A real iPhone 4 or IPod Touch 4 for testing. Fiddler2 for tracing HTTP traffic.

Start by creating an ASP.NET MVC3 Web Application. Ideally you would use IIS to run the application, although if you wish to work with Safari initially, you can use the ASP.NET development server. Just run the application locally and allow IE to open. Then copy the URL to safari. Be sure to select an iPhone user agent in safari if you are inspecting the user agent string and making any decisions on the server based on the request coming from a mobile device.

Create a basic view with html 5 layout and see if you can serve it up in safari or on the device itself. You can use some of the examples in the book “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript” by Jonathan Stark here http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/.

Fiddler is invaluable here because sometimes the only way to figure out what is going on is to watch the traffic. I also discovered you can direct traffic from the actual iPhone/iPod device through your desktop machine by configuring Fiddler to accept remote connections: Fiddler Options, Connections tab, check Allow remote computers to connect. Then on the device, configure Wi-Fi for your same network and establish a manual proxy setting to the IP address of your desktop on port 8888 (fiddler’s default remote proxy port.) Then, all traffic from the device will be captured in fiddler.  You can then turn off the proxy setting on the device until you need it.

Once you are up and running, we can start to explore some of the more interesting features.

A New Chapter

A few weeks ago I was discussing the state of mobile apps with a co-worker and was curious what kinds of things could be supported using in a web application on a mobile device. I started looking for “gesture web app mobile” and stumbled across this book:

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa

by Jonathan Stark

Note the subtitle – “without Objective-C!”  I’ve assumed that to any kind of development on a iPhone, you were immediately locked into Objective-C, a pricy mac, iTunes, etc.

It turns out this is not the case!  With the help of toolkits such as jQTouch and jQuery Mobile most of the work is done for you. Styling, events all get wired up. There is even support for mobile device specific gestures such as swipe. All you need is an idea, some html and some JavaScript.

This discovery was nothing less than a revelation to me.  Everything I know about web development can be put to immediate use building web apps for mobile devices. Further reading on HTML 5 revealed additional features available today such as SQL Database, local storage, and – get this – offline apps. An offline web app – I still can’t believe this one.  A web page that can be cached locally on the device, loaded and run without any network.  Unbelievable!  Felt just like the day – 30 some odd years ago – when someone showed me what a macro assembler was and explained I didn’t have to do 6502 hex jump math in my head anymore!

I quickly ordered a copy of the book and devoured it. I then set about to build the mobile Shopping List app my wife has always wanted.

I’m going to re-start my blog with a series of posts on some of the things I learned as I ventured into this new and (mostly) familiar landscape. Stay tuned!

By the way you can also read the book online for free here: http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/