This section describes how to use Platypus in practice.
The tutorial section gives a series of slices through the development of an app using Platypus - this is a rather idealised view of how Platypus is used. If only development were always so clean, so linear ... :-). This section gives a rather more real-world view of development using Platypus.
The tools section describes what the various Platypus tools do. This section describes how to use the tools.
Documentation in progress Just for security, each app should keep a snapshot of the production classes - and probably the whole Platypus. This could save - serious grief rolling back Platypus for maintenance after the app has been fielded. Changing the name of a PO? -------------------------- This requires edits all over the place: Makefiles, Java imports, static class references (if any), dev.conf, all references in the PO config files, config.xmlc, doc/status.html, and thats all I can think of at the moment (24Aug99). Currently (17Aug99) Pond doesn't give very good error messages about wrong PO names in the config files. Case Inconsistency between Docuverse and OpenXML ------------------------------------------------ Porting from Docuverse to OpenXML threw up a nasty problem: it seems Docuverse treats attribute names as uppercase, but OpenXML treats them as lower case. OpenXML doesn't seem to provide case-insensitve access to attributes. (NOTE: I've had a quick look at OpenXML, and can't track down where it forces attribute names to lower case. Maybe it doesn't.) Anyway, I'm going through Platypus, and putting all hardcoded attribute names into lower case. This means calls to methods: getAttribute(), getNamedItem(). NOTE: If we ever return to Docuverse, we'll need to deal with the case issue again :-(. This affects production code as well as the development code. See the code generated for CHECKBOXes in DynamicNode.java. Doing subheaders in accesses ---------------------------- Describe how we do this ... see EditWorkItemsForm, EditWorkItemsResults, ReportPeriodResults. Regenerating POs Java --------------------- To regenerate a POs Java, you need to (1) either delete the appName/.../XxxxBase.java file or touch the src/.../Xxxx.conf file (so Pond will run again, and overwrite the skeleton in ) and (2) delete the src/.../Xxxx.java (so the skeleton will be copied from view/ into src/).