Everything about Xcode totally explained
Xcode is
Apple's suite of tools for developing software on
Mac OS X. Xcode 3.0, the latest major version, is bundled free with
Mac OS X v10.5, though isn't installed by default. Version 3.0 isn't supported on older Mac OS versions, for which Xcode is also available for free from
Apple Developer Connection.
The main application of the suite is the
integrated development environment (IDE), also named Xcode. The Xcode suite also includes most of Apple's developer documentation, and
Interface Builder, an application used to construct graphical interfaces.
The Xcode suite includes a modified version of
free software GNU Compiler Collection (GCC, apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1), and supports
C,
C++,
Objective-C,
Objective-C++,
Java,
AppleScript,
Python and
Ruby source code with a variety of programming models, including but not limited to
Cocoa,
Carbon, and Java. Third parties have added support for
GNU Pascal,
Free Pascal,
Ada,
C#,
Perl,
Haskell and
D. The Xcode suite uses
GDB as the
back-end for its
debugger.
Xcode is the development environment for the
iPhone, starting version 3.1.
Major features
Among the features of the Xcode suite is the technology to distribute the building of source code over multiple computers. The original, now called
Shared Workgroup Build, uses the
Bonjour protocol to automatically discover computers providing compiler services, and the free software
distcc. More recent versions of Xcode added a second system, called
Dedicated Network Builds, which scales better to larger configurations.
Due to modifications to GCC by Apple, Xcode can build
universal binaries which allows software to run on both
PowerPC and
Intel-based (
x86) platforms. Furthermore the modified GCC can build 32- and 64-bit applications for both architectures. Using the
iPhone SDK, Xcode can also be used to compile and debug applications for the
ARM processor within the device.
Xcode also includes Apple's
WebObjects tools and frameworks for building Java web applications and web services (previously sold as a separate product). As for Xcode 3.0, Apple WebObjects development inside Xcode 3, should be used instead. Xcode 3 still includes the WebObjects frameworks.
In August 2006, Apple announced that
DTrace, a dynamic tracing framework created by
Sun Microsystems and released as part of
OpenSolaris, would be integrated into Xcode as Xray; Xray was later renamed to
Instruments.
History
The Xcode suite, like Mac OS X itself, had its roots in technology from
NeXT. Prior to the
October 24 2003 release of
Mac OS X v10.3, Apple referred to the suite of tools as Developer Tools. The Xcode IDE was developed from and superseded Apple's earlier IDE,
Project Builder which was inherited and rewritten from
NeXT's IDE of the same name.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Xcode'.
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