APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: software-engineering
On documentation
Over at the daily WTF, Alex Papadimoulis writes about Documentation Done Right. His conclusion is spot on: The immediate answer to what’s the right way to do documentation is clear: produce the least amount of documentation needed to facilitate the … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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On private methods
Let’s invent a hypothetical situation. You’re the software architect for an Objective-C application framework at a large company. This framework is used by many thousands of developers to create all sorts of applications for a particular platform. However, you have … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PCAS, software-engineering
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On authorization proxy objects
Authorization Services is quite a nice way to build in discretionary access controls to a Mac application. There’s a whole chapter in Professional Cocoa Application Security (Chapter 6) dedicated to the topic, if you’re interested in how it works. The … Continue reading
Posted in Authorization, code-level, Mac, PCAS, software-engineering
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NSConference MINI videos available
During WWDC week I talked at NSConference MINI, a one-day conference organised by Scotty and the MDN. The videos are now available: free to attendees, or $50 for all 10 for non-attendees. My own talk was on extending the Clang … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, NSConf, software-engineering, tool-support
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On detecting God Classes
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
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, software-engineering, tool-support
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Using Aspect-Oriented Programming for Security Engineering
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
Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support
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Template class for unit testing Core Data entities
Some time ago, in a blog far, far, away, I wrote about unit-testing Core Data. Essentially, your test case class should create a temporary, in-memory Core Data stack in -setUp, and clean it up in -tearDown. Your test methods can … Continue reading
Posted in CoreData, software-engineering, tool-support
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Configuring CruiseControl.rb in under an hour
One of the changes I decided to make straight after NSConf MINI yesterday was to enable continuous integration for my projects. I had used CI before based on BuildBot, but that had left me less than impressed: It was really … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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