New to Yellow Box Development?

"How do I get started?"

Discovering Rhapsody: A Developer Tutorial	Introduces you to application development using a step-by-step approach that has you immediately designing and programming applications. Summarizes important concepts along the way. (Updated for Rhapsody.)
Developing Java Applications: A Tutorial	Shows how to develop Yellow Box Java applications and 100% Pure Java applications using Project Builder and Interface Builder. Warning: Do not open this link in Project Builder. This tutorial uses HTML framesets and Project Builder currently cannot handle frames. Instead use a web browser (see Developer Documentation release notes for information). To begin the tutorial, open index.html in: /System/Documentation/Developer/YellowBox/TasksAndConcepts/JavaTutorial/JavaTutorialIntro (On Windows substitute the value of NEXT_ROOT for /System.) A PDF version of this tutorial is also available in the PDF subdirectory of the JavaTutorial directory.

 

"What's in the core Yellow Box frameworks?"

To get an idea, read:

Introduction to Foundation
Introduction to the Application Kit

 

"What about Objective-C?"

Objective-C is the native OpenStep language. It is an elegant and powerful language, yet one that is simple and easy to learn. Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C Language describes the grammar of Objective-C and presents the concepts behind it

 

"Where do things go in the file system?"

Rhapsody File System Conventions describes the names, locations, and typical contents of the standard directories for system, local, and network files. It also discusses the search paths used for locating files.

 

"How do I get help when I run into problems?"

When you need a question answered while working on a project, you can browse the reference and conceptual documentation. But the development environment also gives you a couple of quick ways to locate information.

Click to Find Out

	To get descriptions of menu commands, fields, buttons, or other areas of Project Builder, click the question-mark button ("Click to Find Out"), which is located on Project Builder's tool bar. Note: In Interface Builder, you press Shift-Option to get the Help cursor.
	The cursor becomes a question mark. When you click an object on the user interface, a summary of that object's function appears underneath the cursor. You can also Help-click a method or other symbol selected in the code editor: Help-clicking on a project symbol initiates a search, via the Project Find panel, for the definition of the symbol in the header files and for associated reference documentation.

Searching for Project Information

With the Project Find panel you can quickly locate the definitions of and the references to symbols in your project, and you can obtain documentation on specific OpenStep symbols.

To open the Project Find panel, click the magnifying-glass button on the tool bar.

Instead of typing the symbol in the Find field, you can Help-click it in the code editor.

Once you've searched for definitions of OpenStep symbols, you can access reference documentation from the Project FInd Panel. Just click a book icon.

How Does It Work?

By default, Project Builder indexes all the symbols in your project, placing them in tables in memory for quick access. These symbols include not only methods, types, constants, and functions from your own classes, but those in imported frameworks such as the Application Kit and Foundation.