iPhone Development - Build Environment

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

As enterprise Java engineers, the iTeam is accustomed to using a continous integration (CI) server, and writing extensive unit tests.  In my current project all code written has to have a corresponding unit test that has 100% code coverage for the unit - anything less will fail the build!  The iTeam members do not have experience with Apple application development and, as such, we spent a fair amount of time talking about what kind of build environment we should setup.  Since the build environment for iPhone applications requires a Mac, we are limited.  All of the iTeam developers are equipped with Mac Book Pros.  However, CityTech doesn’t have any extra macs laying around ready to be re-purposed.  It’s too bad Apple doesn’t let you run Mac OSX in a virtualized enviroment - that would really help.  A group decision was made that a CI server will not be required at this time.

Unit testing is a different story.  Unit testing our iPhone application will create a set of functional documentation.  This functional documentation will help ease our Objective C learning curve.  Although it is unlikely we will set any code coverage rules for this application, it will be good practice for the future.

More soon…

Loose project plan
———————————–
Step one - design app.       [done]
Step two - break ground.     [started]
Step three - setup backend.  [started]
Step four - code app
Step five - test app
Step six - package app
Step seven - submit to apple for approval

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