Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Xcode makes it easy for people working on the same project to get out of sync with
each other, and some resources such as translation files are almost impossible to jointly
develop, for reasons that you'll see in the next chapter, on concurrent development.
There are tricks you can use, involving the new Workspace features that were intro-
duced in Xcode 4, as well as splitting out code with static libraries, that can make your
code more modular and amenable to simultaneous development by more than one
coder. We'll talk about those in depth in
Chapter 2
.
Build Automation Is a Bit of a Challenge
Apple has a very specific view of how applications should be developed, at least if you
take Xcode as a guidepost to their philosophy. While Java developers, for example,
have spent years using tools such as Hudson and Ant to automate the compilation, unit
testing and deployment of their applications, Xcode puts it all under one roof. This is
great if you're flying solo: you can compile, test and archive your code with a push of
a button. But if you want to employ continuous regression testing, you need to really
work at it. The same goes for building and packaging Ad Hoc builds for testers. In most
big companies, handing out binaries that you compiled on your development machine
won't win you many friends.
There are ways that you can compile and test from the command line, and even integrate
Xcode builds into integration tools such as Hudson. Some of them are even officially
supported! In
Chapter 3
, you'll see how you can create a reliable continuous integration
system, and learn what you can and can't do with it.
Objective-C Doesn't Play Well with Others
Enterprises love SOAP. It has built in support through frameworks such as CXF and
JAX-WS for Java, and .NET developers can leverage the rich support for SOAP in
modern versions of Visual Studio.
The iPhone and its cousins support it not a whit. Unless you want to construct your
XML by hand, there is no native support for SOAP in iOS. Even the XML support in
iOS is a pure pull parser model, when what you frequently want is a DOM parser.
Thankfully, iOS has finally introduced support for JSON in iOS 5!
Luckily, there are good third-party libraries for most of these, even SOAP. If you're
willing to make use of open source libraries, you can talk to just about anything from
iOS, although it may take a bit of work.
Chapter 4
looks at how to talk to SOAP, REST,
JSON and pure XML backend servers.
