Rapid Application Development with Cocoa on Mac OS X

During the AUC Conference a workshop was held for all interested programmers. Details of the workshop and the hand-outs are available below. The AUC is investigating the possibility of running these workshops around the country in early 2002.

Presenter
Dr Ashley Aitken, A.Aitken@Curtin.Edu.Au

Abstract
Cocoa is a mature and powerful set of object-oriented application development frameworks. Together, these frameworks and the unique development tools provided with Mac X constitute an incredible rapid application development environment. This workshop will give an overview of the power and capabilities of Cocoa and the Mac X development tools, as well as demonstrating and giving you hands-on experience at Cocoa development. It will also briefly discuss the Objective-C programming language and compare and contrast it with Java. Those who attend will see (and experience) the ease at which one can build Cocoa desktop applications. After you see what can be done in 90 minutes, you'll understand better what you could do with Cocoa in a couple of months!

Workshop Overview
• Introduction
• What is Cocoa?
• Cocoa Development Tools
• Objective-C
• Preparing for Cocoa Development
• Resources
• Q & A

Hand-outs

Cocoa Resources & Roadmap

Object Orientation Framework

Biography
Ashley is a senior lecturer in object-oriented software engineering from the School of Information Systems at Curtin University of Technology. He is an Apple-certified Cocoa trainer, and Australia's only fully Apple-certified WebObjects trainer. He has over twelve years experience teaching and training in industry and academia around Australia, across S/East Asia, and in the UK and US. Ashley has received recognition from his students, his University, the computer industry, and the federal government for the excellence of his teaching and training. His research interests include object orientation and software engineering. He has worked on many successful industry-based WebObjects development projects and is currently working on two WebObjects projects supported by AUC research grants.