Sample project showing a common architecture I use when creating iOS Projects.
The project itself is quite simple:
- Getting Yahoo's Sports feed from their XML RSS.
- Parsing it
- Returning the results to the
UIViewController, where then they can be showed.
There is a Branding part, where I expose a strategy to deal with this. So:
- We have two brands: Nike and Adidas.
- Depending on being on Debug or not, we will choose the right one to be used.
There are many ways of doing it, although I think mine has some advantages.
You will need cocoapods in order to build this project
One of the main issues across the iOS development ecosystem is the lack of a well stablished architecture, from small to big applications.
There is also a huge gap of Repositories/Projects/Samples that show what an app should look like, from a architectural point of view.
You can see that when:
- You have Logic mixed with UI.
- You cannot see the boundaries between the Controller and the Model (MVC)
- Your
UIViewControllerssurpass 300 lines (From my experience when aUIViewControllerpasses that frontier, normally something could be done better) - It's not clear for you where things are and how to use them.
Each project has it's own demons, so what I want with this sample project, is a way for iOS developers to have a reference for what they should always try to achieve:
- Strive for small, simple, clean, understandable and maintainable classes.
- Respect the SOLID principles.
- Respect the DRY Principle.
- Respect the 4 OOP principles: Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, Polymorphism.
- Create methods that do one thing and one thing only (this is specially useful for Unit Testing).
- Create meaningful names for your methods, classes, variables, properties. This is one of the most underestimated part of coding.
Start by adding some breakpoints and keep pushing until you understand what's going on. If you find it's a bit difficult to use/understand it, send me a tweet, or open an issue, and I will try to assist the best I can. If you happen to use this architecture in one of your apps, just flag it for me. :)
I am more than happy to change the current structure of this project, based on people's suggestions. The goal here is to improve the way we code. So please, if you think that something is fundamentaly wrong, or that could be improved, open an issue, create a pull request or just let me know.
1.3
Added an example of how branding can be achieved and architected inside an iOS application. As explained, on the commit message, different strategies can be putted in place, depending on how you want the branding to behave. For example, some branding besides images, also change the overall layout of the UI (position of the elements on the screen).
In this case I use a class called RPBrandingFactory responsible for returning a Class <RPImagesBrandingProtocol> that is able to respond to certain messages (in this case related to how we deal with images). The use of a protocol + Class, makes it easier to use (as the class, in the end of the day, acts as a Factory) and flexible to add, in the future, other brands.
1.2
An object of type id <RPSportsBoundaryProtocol> can now the be injected into the RPSportsFeedViewController (you can see this as he complies to the RPDataSourceManagerInjection protocol). By default it will be used RPDataSourceManager. This is specially useful for Unit Testing, as you can inject a mock one. I also added an example of how to do it on the test suite (check the RPSportsFeedViewControllerTesting.m and RPMockDataSourceManager). The RPSportsBoundaryProtocol is now expecting an object (as the method -(void)yahooSportsFeedWithCompletion:(RPYahooSportsCompletionBlock)completionBlock is an instance one)
) versus a class, although I am still weighting the pros and cons.
1.1
The access to the Model, by the UIViewControllers, are now made by a Interactor object. Instead of returning a reference to the RPDataSourceManager Class (since we are using class methods), we return an abstract Class that conforms to a given protocol. You can see this see this strategy applied here, the video is present by Robert Martin aka Uncle Bob.
This code is distributed under the terms and conditions of the MIT license.
