On platform-specific strategies

I’m writing some library code at the moment that needs to work on both Mac OS X and iOS. The APIs I need to use on each platform are different, so I need different code on each platform. I also happen to think that putting both versions of the code in the same implementation file is icky.

Here’s what I’m doing. I define an abstract class FZAPlatformStrategy, that defines the interface and knows how to choose an appropriate subclass depending on the platform.

FZAPlatformStrategy.h

@interface FZAPlatformStrategy : NSObject {
@private
}
- (void)doThing;
+ (FZAPlatformStrategy *)newPlatformStrategy;

@end

FZAPlatformStrategy.m

@implementation FZAPlatformStrategy

- (void)doThing {
    [[NSException exceptionWithName: @"FZAPlatformStrategyAbstractClassException"
                            reason: @"Use +[FZAPlatformStrategy newPlatformStrategy] to get an appropriate subclass"
                          userInfo: nil] raise];
}

+ (FZAPlatformStrategy *)newPlatformStrategy {
    id strategy = nil;
#if TARGET_OS_IPHONE
    strategy = [[FZAPlatformStrategyiPhone alloc] init];
#else
    strategy = [[FZAPlatformStrategyMac alloc] init];
#endif
    return platformStrategy;
}

@end

OK, so now as you can imagine there is a class FZAPlatformStrategyiPhone that uses the iOS APIs, and another FZAPlatformStrategyMac that uses the OS X APIs. Each of these overrides the -doThing method to provide the appropriate platform-specific implementation. Of course, to get these to compile I conditionally define the whole @implementation contents of each based on the target platform.

The library code that needs to interface with this code just calls [FZAPlatformStrategy newPlatformStrategy]; to get an instance, and then because we’ve encapsulated the platform-specific behaviour it can use whatever it gets in a consistent way. Need to add another platform, say GNUStep/Linux? Define a new FZAPlatformStrategy subclass, and change +newPlatformStrategy to know when to return an instance of that subclass.

The remaining bit of ugly is the preprocessor conditional in +newPlatformStrategy. I decided to leave this as-is: it is at least highly localised ugly. The other approach I considered and discarded was to look for a platform-specific class like UIDevice being non-Nil, but then I realised that someone would probably implement that on the other platform and mess up the test.

Any other solutions for doing the “which platform am I on” test gratefully received.