I first tried to DIY it by duplicating the “Skeleton” application and editing things. That didn’t last long as there are a fair number of files and I don’t know the system well enough to just zip around the relevant ones and go.

Then I had an idea. “I could check the documentation!”

So I did, and found “A Quick-Start Guide to Writing Applications in Garden“. Perfect!

Well, kind of. It was quick, but provoked a bit of head-scratching as it’s apparently in need of a little updating. For instance, following along as best I could resulted in an ugly, unstyled page when the Guide indicated I should have a lovely, finished-looking beauty. Turns out I needed to add a bunch of javascript and style calls.

Much more concerning than these minor oversights is the final sentence:

Of course you can do much more than just simple pages, but this is really all you need to know in order get your own applications up and running.

Ummm… The Guide ends with a basic, essentially static page with “Hello world!” printed on it. No mention of how to interact with the database, for instance. Which wouldn’t be too bad, except all of the links to “full documentation on applications” lead to an error: “The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist (yet)”

Well, those are the brakes sometimes, right? So now I’ll plow in and see what I can figure out from the code itself (it’s supposed to be well-commented), and record what I’m doing to get the results (I’m hoping that) I get. Wish me luck!