Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
Concurrent Development with iOS
Enterprise application development at most companies is usually about teams, often
large teams. The Agile movement has done little to change this tendency, and in fact
embraces the idea of team development, with a backlog of stories that are apportioned
out to the pool of developers on the team on a sprint by sprint basis.
So what does this mean for iOS applications development? Well, if you're a Java pro-
grammer working in Eclipse, you can split up development pretty easily. Eclipse is
largely directory based, and the Eclipse project file is fairly stable. Xcode…not so much.
Xcode is the obsessive-compulsive poster child of IDEs. It wants to manage every single
file at a micromanager level, and it's not enough to drop new files into a directory, you
need to tell Xcode to use them in specific build targets, and all of that info is stored in
a single
xcodeproj
file.
If you're not very careful when creating new files in Xcode, you tend to end up with
everything in one flat directory. Using groups can give structure to the project view
inside Xcode, but it does nothing to organize the physical file system layout. And as
you may have already discovered, trying to go in after the fact and move files around
on disk is messy, because there's no way to notify Xcode that you're doing it. The best
I've ever done is to delete the references (which turn red when you move the files), then
re-add them and hope that you haven't screwed up your build manifests in the process.
A Little Ditty 'bout Tom and Diane
Let's look at a very small project with two developers, and see how things can get messy
very quickly. We'll be developing a social networking tool throughout the topic, and
our two developers (Tom and Diane) are going to start with the login screen. Tom is
in charge of UI, and Diane with backend integration. Unfortunately, Tom and Diane
work for BuggyWhipCo, which is still using (shudder) CVS as the source management
platform, which isn't supported natively by Xcode. As of this writing, Xcode only sup-
ports git and Subversion natively in the UI, so our intrepid pair is going to have to check
their code in manually on the command line. This is not at all uncommon—git is
