Build and project management tool for iOs build and dependencies

Question

I have a Java, Apache Maven and Android background and I am dabbling a bit with iOS. Now I am wondering if there is some sort of standard tool chain that helps with things like

• managing scm details (svn, git, mercurial, branching, tagging..)
• release management (version numbering, managing dev vs prod configuration...)
• working with dependencies (e.g. centralized for multiple project and developers, remote access)
• IDE independent build
• CI build
• testing libraries (unit testing, integration testing, ui testing, mocking)
• static analysis
• project health reporting
• other IDEs

and a whole bunch of other things that the Maven ecosystem provides like public library repositories and so on. From my initial research there does not seem much around, but I might just be looking in the wrong places.

What are the must have tools and libraries for iOS development?

Also I have the impression that Xcode rules it all and if a feature is not there you end up out of luck (e.g. git or hg support) and add other tools. Thats fine but you will always have to use Xcode right?

Answer 1

We open-sourced our XCode Maven plug-in some weeks ago. At SAP we use it to build all our iOS apps and libraries centrally in a product standard compliant way with Maven on a Hudson. Libraries and apps are deployed to Nexus and dependencies (to libraries) are resolved automatically by Maven.

Some overview documentation and binaries on Maven central are still missing, but the sources and technical documentation are already available on Github. If you have questions please write to our mailing list. We will try to help you.

http://sap-production.github.com/xcode-maven-plugin
https://github.com/sap-production/xcode-maven-plugin

Kind regards, Alex