Objective-Cloud update - New way of linking and CocoaPods - 2013-06-19
I would like to give you a short update on what is going on with Objective-Cloud. We have started the private beta about two weeks ago and slowly began to invite people in. The feedback we got was very constructive and helpful. Thank you all for that. In a few days we will deploy a minor update of Objective-Cloud that will improve a couple of things by installing the Objective-Cloud frameworks on your system in /Library/Frameworks. At the moment every cloud application has to link against two frameworks:
- OCFoundation: contains utility and communication classes
- OCAppKit: contains classes which enabled the communication between your cloud application and it's services.
Both frameworks are part each and every cloud application Xcode project we create for you. If you have ten cloud applications you have ten identical copies of OCFoundation and OCAppKit on your system. The situation get's even worse when you look at it from Objective-Cloud's point of view: Let's assume we have ten customers and each customer has ten cloud applications then there are one hundred identical copies of those frameworks lying around. This is bad and we had to fix. We have fixed this issue by shipping those frameworks as a installer package. The installer will install our frameworks to /Library/Frameworks. We will also change the Xcode projects generated by Objective-Cloud to not include the frameworks anymore. Instead we just link against /Library/Frameworks/OCFoundation.framework (OCAppKit.framework will be removed and integrated in OCFoundation.framework).
This sounds complicated! But it isn't. When you first download Terrasphere it will automatically install the frameworks for you. If we have a new version of those frameworks Terrasphere will inform you about that.
If you are brave enough you can try out the framework installer now. We will deploy this update hopefully this week and if you are a beta tester we need your help! Once we have deployed this update you should download the latest version of Terrasphere. You also should use connect.objective-cloud.com to create new applications (as you need them). This will give you a Xcode project which conforms to the changes we made. Shortly after we have deployed the update we will publish a short tutorial which describes how to transition existing applications to this new way of linking against OCFoundation. In addition to all that we are getting rid of OCAppKit and unify it with OCFoundation.
CocoaPods
We had a close look at CocoaPods and came to the conclusion that this is a very handy thing to support. So we are planning to support CocoaPods as well. You can use CocoaPods for your cloud applications already but we will support CocoaPods in a way that allows us to add your "Pods" directory to the .gitignore file.