Can I develop my own objective-C Framework for Cocoa Touch Applications?

Question

Is it possible to create an own obj-C Cocoa Touch framework which can be used by other developers? And furthermore can you protect this framework?

Answer 1

Take a look at a worked example for static libraries given at this site

Answer 2

The frameworks in Objective C are typically just C / ObjC code and a bunch of classes, nothing amazingly special. As such, you can create your own if you'd like, and then just include that in your project when you build it. The iPhone doesn't care about the difference, it just knows to put all that code into your app, along with everything else.

Have a look at the Framework Programming Guide on Apple's website. It will get you started. Essentially what you'll do is create a Framework project in XCode and then go from there.

As for "protecting" your framework, I assume you mean making your code unreadable. I'm not sure if and how you can do this, but perhaps Apple's guide will say something about it.

Answer 3

You can create a static library. There is an option in the XCode project chooser to do this. You'll have to distribute the compiled static library file and the header files to users of your library. Your actual implementation files (.m) do not need to be distributed.

GHUnit does a good job of this - packaging up the libraries for both simulator and device - so I recommend looking at this project. (I also recommend using this library for unit testing :-)