Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Objective-C tooling

Java development tools are top of the pile out of anything I've used. The IDEs are massively powerful (they have to be, with the warts on the language). I'm also an emacs user day to day, and pragmatically use vim as well. But Eclipse / IDEA / Netbeans are pretty amazing tools for Java The Language development.

Respectively for Objective-C development, Xcode isn't.

If Apple Ts&Cs allow, IntelliJ could probably make some impressive inroads into that market.

clang is a good (and getting better all the time) addition. The debugger needs some love; I don't find gdb as powerful as Java debuggers.

In Java-land, one can use maven, ant, ivy, Make, etc to build a project. For iOS development, the IDE rules a lot from the off. There is a command-line tool which can potentially be driven by Jenkins or Thoughtworks Go. That would be my preferred option going forward; in my view, building in an IDE is not a repeatable build process.

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