Sharing classes between projects in xcode/objective-c

Question

I\'ve got a client<=>server app I\'m building for Mac OS X, using Objective-c/Cocoa and xCode. I\'ve created a different project for both the apps I have, and I\'m wonder

Answer 1

A very good way to do it is to put the shared code into SCM system and include it into each project you want it in. This way every project can share the code, you can edit it anywhere and just check the changes back into source control when you're feeling good about it — and then all the other projects benefit from your work.

This has big advantages over other ways of doing it IMO:

vs. frameworks: Packaging code into a framework is pretty annoying, and bundle-private frameworks take an unreasonably long time to load — especially just to get a few classes into your app. Wil Shipley of Omni Group (at the time) once found that the frameworks the company included in all their apps were adding several seconds to the start time of each app. Packaging private classes in a framework can also encourage more coupling than is strictly necessary — it's really tempting just to make One True Framework where all your shared classes reside, so you start assuming this code will always live together. and it becomes inseparable. Basically, frameworks are a hammer and this problem is a screw.

vs. just including files: Hopefully you'll put your app into an SCM at some point anyway, and simply including the files in-place creates a problem because they'll be missing from SCM. Copying the files into each project introduces the opposite problem — each project will include its own version of the files and you'll have to manually propagate any useful changes.