Let's imagine - we have some SDK and a lot of released versions.
SDK includes static lib and headers, of course I can't build different versions in one project because of conflicts in class names etc...
We need to test all of them each time and purpose of testing NOT SDK itself.
I was asked to put all of released SDKs to one application and allow to switch between them.
I can create separate projects/targets and provide different ipa to install with different SDK's versions.
So my question - is that possible to create just ONE iOS project which generates iOS application to launch and switch between SDK versions to test? How?
Thanks in advance
No, you won't be able to link different versions of your SDK in the same app. 3rd party libraries and frameworks are statically linked. You can, however, create a single project that has several targets, each of which builds a version of the app with a different version of your SDK.
Your case seems like a great candidate for automated unit testing. If you build a suite of unit tests that exercise your SDK, you could easily and automatically run those tests against each version of the test app.
Related
We are planning to move our codebase to flutter, but we have some specific requirements and trying to validate them before moving all our codebase to flutter.
With same codebase we are producing multiple targets in IOS and Android (In android its called flavors). And each target has different bundleId, application icons, launch images etc...
For each target we have a scheme related with that target.
We've 4 build configurations (Debug_Development,Debug_production,Release_Development,Release_production) to compile all of our targets.
I've looked at the below examples :
https://cogitas.net/creating-flavors-of-a-flutter-app/
https://medium.com/#salvatoregiordanoo/flavoring-flutter-392aaa875f36
But both of them were about creating multiple build configurations, but they don't mention about creating multiple targets.
So my question is , is it possible to create multiple targets and multiple schemes at the same time with flutter ?
If its possible , how can we do that?
You can see our current applications scheme and target configurations in below screenshot:
Thanks
I have a Youtube tutorial series on how to do this exactly. Following that, you will be able to separate environments in dart as well as native side and you will be able to use all the features available with Android flavors and iOS schemas and build-configurations.
In the tutorial I have shown how to use two different firebase configurations for dev and production version in both iOS and Android. If you have any questions, you can comment
You can use build variants:
A flavour or a build variant can be multiple things, it can be used to
target different device architectures or different backends. Android
presents a separate distinction to both, so you can target different
Android API versions and well as different backend support, for iOS
I’m not quite certain, but it also does support these in some fashion.
and for doing this you need to modify the main.dart to support variants, here is the full article how this will work on different environments.
I'm distributing libraries for other developers to use (http://empiric.al). I've noticed that between swift versions, even 2.0 to 2.1, I'll get Module file was created by a (newer/older) version of the compiler.
I need to be distribute in a future-proof way.
How can I make sure my compiled frameworks can be used by newer versions of Swift in the future so I don't have to recompile as soon as Apple puts a new beta out?
From Apple's website:
Binary Compatibility and Frameworks
While your app’s runtime compatibility is ensured, the Swift language
itself will continue to evolve, and the binary interface will also
change. To be safe, all components of your app should be built with
the same version of Xcode and the Swift compiler to ensure that they
work together.
This means that frameworks need to be managed carefully. For instance,
if your project uses frameworks to share code with an embedded
extension, you will want to build the frameworks, app, and extensions
together. It would be dangerous to rely upon binary frameworks that
use Swift — especially from third parties. As Swift changes, those
frameworks will be incompatible with the rest of your app. When the
binary interface stabilizes in a year or two, the Swift runtime will
become part of the host OS and this limitation will no longer exist.
Until the Swift ABI (application binary interface) stabilises (I'm guessing another year or two) the only way to distribute libraries that will work across different Xcode versions is to distribute the source code. Cocoa pods and Carthage are both good tools for making library distribution easier but for Swift code they will still rely on source code being available.
It might be possible to have an Cocoapod that detects the version of Xcode it is run with and then downloads and provides the correct build of your library but you will still need to build the libraries for all Xcode versions that you want to support and recompile every time Apple release a new Xcode but at least the user wouldn't need to download a new version manually.
I'm completely confused and I don't know where to start asking questions. I tried googling, but the terminology is confusing and I'm not sure what either of these things do (except for Xcode). Can someone explain like I'm 5?
I'm on the cocos2d-swift website and after reading the getting started section it says "From this point onwards, using SpriteBuilder is optional.". I don't know what they mean by that.
How do each of these correlate with each other?
Also, how is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager useful to an everyday iOS Developer?
cocos2d-swift is a framework that enables you to build things like sprite-based games quickly.
SpriteBuilder is a tool that helps you build your own multilayered sprites (images and animations grouped into a single package -- i.e. Mario, a Goomba, a Fireflower fireball, etc.).
Xcode is a developer environment in which you write your source code, compile, distribute, and test.
CocoaPods is a tool that fetches and manages framework/SDK dependancies.
You would use CocoaPods to fetch the cocos2d-swift framework so that you could build a sprite-based game in Xcode using sprites you generated in SpriteBuilder.
Not sure what Cocos2d is, but swift is the latest programming language by Apple for both OS X and iOS development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
SpriteBuilder is a framework used to create games for iOS very quick. Think of it as a game engine.
http://www.spritebuilder.com/about
Xcode is the IDE (integrated development environment) that you use when writing native OS X and iOS applications. It's awesome!
CocoaPods is a way to load in third-party libraries and frameworks without having to manually install them on your own. It also makes it very easy to keep the frameworks up-to-date. Pods also allows your project to be more portable as it's much easier to install an application with multiple dependancies via Pods.
http://cocoapods.org
A documentation browser is good if you want to have access to documentation while offline. However, I almost always use Google to find what I'm looking for regardless of what technology I'm working on. Google is just the best way to search.
Finally, I'd start off with this book. I read the first edition years ago, and made things very easy for me to understand.
http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html
Hope this helps!
Here are some basics:
XCode (A Program)- Most of your iOS development will happen here. Coding, creating the app etc.
Think of an SDK as a suite of commands or tools you can use-API's (API - Application programming interface)
Cocoas2d (An SDK) - Game engine. A software development kit for creating games. you would pull this library of code and tools into xcode to use it.
SpriteBuilder (An SDK) - Suite of tools for building games. Just like Cocoas, you would pull this into xCode to make use of it as you code.
CocoaPods - A tool for linking/loading SDK's into XCode and easily updating them.
Moral of the story: XCode is the software you will use for everything. Everything else are just additional libraries of code you can pull in.
I've seen project such as ios-universal-framework, but I want to know why XCode iOS does not natively support having a framework. Is it some kind of legal issue. The static library option is not good enough because I want to be able to use .dylib files in my framework.
A little background on what I want to do with a framework. I have a project that is generated from Unity3D, and when we update, we have to manually add back all of our project changes.
What I want is to use a framework that can store most of those external libraries and resources to make it easier to upgrade our project when updates are released.
From a security perspective no code is allowed to be dynamically loaded, thus only static libraries are allowed.
It is possible to create static psudo-frameworks. Take a look at GitHub iOS-Universal-Framework.
What you need is a PosprocessBuilder as described in the build pipeline described in the Unity3d Documentation.
You can manage the Xcode configurations in this pipeline using scripts like the Xcode Zerg.
I've used one python script written by a guy called Calvin Rien that worked really well, if you want to know more about this script this blog post should give you a hint.
What you really need to look for to you automate the these steps is to look for posts of Continuous Integration using Unity 3d and iOS like this one:
Unity3d: from commit to deployment onto tester devices in 20 min using Jenkins
We have a fairly rich e-learning app, built mostly using cocos2d. Currently we are in alpha and want to setup our project structure so we can also build a Mac version to target the Mac App store. It is about 80% cocos2d with some intitial screens in UIKit which will have to be ported to Mac (re-written).
What is the recommended setup for targeting both the Mac and iOS app stores from a single code base? I assume the choices are:
Create 2 xCode projects in the same application source code root folder and use each project to build a single target. This would be: Project.xcodeproj and ProjectMac.xcodeproj
Add a new Mac target to our existing iPad application project and then fiddle with target membership to get the desired results. This would be just: Project.xcodeproj
Further complicating the situation is that we currently use cocos2d as a static library for the iOS app. We also have a library called CoreInfrastructure that has a lot of code we use across all our projects. Recently I have figured out that I can create a project to simultaneously build a framework targeting Mac and a library targeting iOS from the same code base. This is done by starting with a framework project and adding a target to build a static lib for iOS.
So just wanted to get everyone's opinion and insight. Anyone know of any caveats to watch out for in the above choices? Anyone who is building for Mac and iOS app stores simultaneously care to share their structure? Adding a target worked on our library code ... is that the way to go for the application as well?
Are there any issues doing archive and distribution builds for either choice?
Thanks in advance.
WWDC session "Sharing code between iOS and OS X" answers all the basic questions in this topic. iWork team presented how they have got away with creating Pages, Keynote and Numbers with shared code base for both iOS and OS X.
The key for their project was using:
separate Xcode targets for iOS and OS X
separate project for the shared code in a form of a .framework
target dependency on the framework from the point above
I encourage to watch the video or read the transcript from this session:
WWDC 2014 Sharing code between iOS and OS X
ASCIIWWDC transcript
I recently used kstenerud's iOS Universal Framework to build a shared framework codebase that works for both iOS and Mac apps. I just needed to manually add a target for a Cocoa framework after I had created a project for an iOS framework. That way I can develop the sharable code once in the framework and link it in both the iOS and Mac apps. You can even make the framework contain UIKit-specific code for your iOS app and AppKit-specific code for your Mac apps. I wrote about it in my blog if you are interested.
For the applications use two separate projects. Using multiple targets for iOS and Mac in one project is very useful if they are sharing a library or framework. However, in your top level application almost nothing is shared. The UIKit code will need to be totally rewritten to use AppKit, the dependencies will be different, and even most of the project settings will vary.
Of course if you really want to see everything at once you can put both platform specific application projects and all the shared dependent library/framework projects in a single workspace. This is more a question of work style. If you want to switch back and forth between the two frequently this makes the most sense. If you want to simplify what you are looking at you can put them in separate workspaces that share many of the same projects. Separate workspaces has the disadvantage that a project can only be open in one workspace at a time so you effectively can only work on one at a time.
I just use multi-platform static library targets for the shared sources. You will need to expand that to the dependencies, however. If you have platform dependent implementations, you may want to create supplemental export libraries for those symbols.
So your structure might take this form:
CoreInfrastructure - cross platform static library.
PlatShared - cross platform static library.
PlatSpecific-OS X - OS X static library (or framework).
PlatSpecific-iOS - iOS static library.
The OS X app links to CoreInfrastructure, PlatShared, PlatSpecific-OSX, Cocos for OS X, and system libs.
The iOS app links to CoreInfrastructure, PlatShared, PlatSpecific-iOS, Cocos for iOS, and sys libs.
Problem (I've found) is, there are a lot of people who have not had much/any experience developing and maintaining complex project structures in Xcode. It's a pain (IMO) to setup duplicate targets, and properly maintain them as they grow -- even when they all refer to the same source files. That's why i prefer minimal targets and proper dependency structure.