Category Archives: code-level

On detecting God Classes

Posted on 2010-07-08 by Graham

Opinion on Twitter was divided when I suggested the following static analyser behaviour: report on any class that conforms to too many protocols. Firstly, a warning: “too many” is highly contextual. Almost all objects implement NSObject and you couldn’t do … Continue reading →

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Using Aspect-Oriented Programming for Security Engineering

Posted on 2010-06-24 by Graham

This paper by Kotrappa Sirbi and Prakash Jayanth Kulkarni (link goes to HTML abstract, full text PDF is free) discusses implementation of an application’s security requirements in Java using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). We have AOP for Objective-C (of sorts), but … Continue reading →

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On NSNull as an anti-pattern

Posted on 2010-05-25 by Graham

All this talk about type-safe collections may leave you thinking: but what about NSNull? Let’s say you have an array that only accepts objects conforming to MyProtocol. You can’t add +[NSNull null] to it, because it doesn’t implement the protocol. … Continue reading →

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On type safety and making it harder to write buggy code

Posted on 2010-05-24 by Graham

Objective-C’s duck typing system is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it’s amazingly flexible. A curse, in that such flexibility can lead to some awkward problems. Something that typically happens in dealing with data from a … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac | 5 Comments