hammer

Hammer your iOS code into shape without having to rebuild.

Have you ever experienced any of these:

gotten tired of having to rebuild/compile your app whenever you make a small change, e.g. changing a label’s text, changing the background color of a view, changing the layer properties etc.
have a large codebase and want to make quick edits without having to go through the whole save/build/run process?
just want to be able to “refresh” a page after editing your code, just like how those fancy web developers do it?

If you answered YES to any of those questions, hammer might be for you.

Hammer works by taking advantage of the Objective-C runtime, and dynamic libraries.

Hammer is a very simple (right now, proof of concept) piece of code, in two parts.

A Python script that compiles whatever you are editing in Xcode into a dynamic library and copies it into the Simulator, in the latest App container’s Documents directory
An Objective-C class with a method that loads whatever dynamic libs were “hammered” into the App container

Right now this is a proof of concept and a very rough implementation with several assumptions:

You are working with Objective-C (Swift to follow!)
You only have one class per .m file, and the class name is the same as the filename!

To integrate it with your project, you only have to:

add a reference to Hammer.m and Hammer.h in your project
add a shortcut to [[Hammer sharedInstance] triggerHammer]. In the sample project, it is added to the shake gesture, so the changes can be loaded with a simple keyboard shortcut.
add a call to [[Hammer sharedInstance] initialize] in application:didFinishLaunching... to clear patches from the last run.
Make sure to build your project once in Xcode, and run it once in the simulator

To “hammer” in code while your app is running in the Simulator, you have two options:

(Experimental) Using fs_watcher.py

This requires watchdog. It can be installed via easy_install watchdog
Run the fs_watcher.py script with the root directory of your source tree as a parameter. This will watch your directory for changed .m files and build them into the app data directory.
trigger the shake gesture in the simulator (via cmd+ctrl+z), assuming you've bound [[Hammer sharedInstance] triggerHammer] to it

You can also manually call the hammer script:

make your changes in Xcode, save
run python hammer.py. No parameters needed, the only requirement is the edited file has to be currently open in Xcode.
trigger the shake gesture in the simulator (via cmd+ctrl+z), assuming you've bound [[Hammer sharedInstance] triggerHammer] to it
repeat for every change

Done. This is a proof of concept for now so there is a lot of things still to do.

See LICENSE

maranas/hammer