Objective C is like programming with the dinosaurs

I finally got the HTML / GZIP / XML parsing to work on the Mac. Do you know what the problem was? I was not using the same version of the TouchXML code as the person who did that left. I described some of those issues in the last post.

This morning I downloaded an even newer version of TouchXML figuring that was the issue. It still crashed. I installed Wireshark on my PC and on the Mac. I though maybe the server call was hosed so I looked at the packets and they were fine. That meant it was the code at fault. Another developer and I worked on tracing through things and figuring out the odd way you have to query the contents of variables. If I would have known how to do that earlier I would not have messed with Wireshark.

For me it is hard to fathom why the XCode IDE is so behind the times. It is just not anywhere near as powerful as IntelliJ, Eclipse, NetBeans, Delphi, Borland C++ or Visual Studio. It is not that I am not a Mac guy it is just that I have used a lot of very nice IDEs. Have Mac developers not used other IDEs? Eclipse and IntelliJ are available on the Mac, I have used both on the Mac. They work just as well on that platform as they do on the PC. XCode is crappy. It does not have may hot keys, it does not support tabbed files, it loves to pop up all kinds of windows and the debugger stinks.

I just want to see the contents of my variables but it does not show them even things as simple as string don't show up. I used the GDB window to type "p (char *)[(NSString *)[element data] UTF8String] to see the data in a String! This is just crazy to me. In Java or C# I just hover over the variable and I see the contents. Even if it is just a NSString I still have to do "p (char *)[data UTF8String]. I had some really deep variables and it was a real pain to type all the typecasting to get any data out of them.

The IDE works, the debugger works, it is just a pain to get to your data.

Getting to the actual issue - the debug window was trying to tell me the problem. I thought it was crashing in a method but it turns out the method did not exist. Of course I am used to the compiler telling me with a very obvious compiler error not having this happen at run time in a debugger window. The new version of TouchXML changed from childElements to children and elementCount to childCount. I thought it was crashing in the childElements call getting back 0 elements thus annoying the loop. This is due to Objective C being a dynamic language. Part of my learning experience but man was it an annoying experience.

This is a bizarre situation, I was upgrading by accident as I had no idea what version the original developer used. Normally you would know you are upgrading and when the debugger complained you would spot the problem quickly. I was just happy I was able to get things to compile initially. I thought that meant I had the proper TouchXML code.

Things are not all rosy still. It is giving me back blank strings when I request the "name" for one of my XML items. I will have to chase that down too. Not crashing, just a blank string. No idea what is going on there. Just getting to a variable with no depth is bad but getting to a collection of things is going to be a major hassle. I hope I can find it quickly in the morning. Probably just leads to other issues and I am not going to trust the code until I can run it through all of its paces.

I will check it all in, including the new TouchXML classes tomorrow if I can get the XML strings to display. It is making us wonder if it would have been better to start this application from scratch instead of trying to update the code. That is pretty sad actually. Not something that I have done in other languages in a long time, just punted, unless the code was just super crappy. I think the code is generally OK it is the IDE and the language this is fighting me.