I was wondering if there were a way to extract information from an objective-c app, static or dynamic library and/or framework?
Information such as an array of class names without instantiating or running the target.
I've checked google and the apple developer documentation and haven't found anything.
Frank
F-script appears to be able to do what you want, but I'm no expert. Check out www.fscript.org.
If you want to extract classes from an application/dynamic library, there is a handy tool called ClassDump.
It can even generate the header files in order to get an overview of the classes, protocols, etc.
If you want to do it at runtime, then take a look at the source code to learn how to load and parse the different mach-o segments.
This is an excellent starting point for reverse-engineering Cocoa apps:
http://culater.net/wiki/moin.cgi/CocoaReverseEngineering
It mentions F-Script, class-dump, and a few others.
Related
Later i worked with symfony framework. In this framework we can easily build a multi language project by using FOSUserBundle. But i do'nt know what to do in phalcon! In the Phalcon documentation (multi-lingual-support) explained a way for it! But if i have many languages this way is too difficult!
Do yo know about any provided library for multi language projects?
You can either use the Phalcon\Translate to translate all your strings in respective arrays - one file per language. The reference in the documentation as you correctly posted is here and it refers to the native array adapter.
There are additional adapters in the incubator repo, for PO files or database driven.
You might also want to see the internationalization area in the documentation.
take a look at this piece of code
https://bitbucket.org/moderndeveloperllc/phalconlocale/src
I want to create an Objective-C application which lets you specify a class implementation at runtime.
I want the user to type some code (correctness of the code is out of scope for now).
When the user is done i want to create a class of the typed code and use it in the application.
So i want to dynamically add code in runtime of the application. Is this possible?
If so, how can i achieve this? If not, why not and are there any alternatives to create the same effect which i want to create?
Thanks.
You can dynamically load classes at runtime, but to get there you'd first need to handle distributing a compiler, its compilation dependencies (headers, ...), setup its enviroment, etc.
Usually applications use scripting languages that are painlessly embeddable (Lua, Python, ...) or already available on the platform (JavaScript, AppleScript, ...).
I'd check out F-Script. It's closer to smalltalk than Obj-C, but IMO it's closer to Obj-C than JavaScript or Lua :-)
On iOS devices, this isn't possible. On a Mac you could link against the clang+llvm libraries and use them to generate code into a buffer, then mprotect() the buffer to be executable, I believe.
I'm currently using BWToolkit, does anyone know if there are any steps that need to be taken before submitting to the app store (as far as licensing)? Do I need to put any disclaimers anywhere etc? I know it's BSD licensed but I don't want to have my app rejected because I missed a simple legal step.. Any help?
I don't think that NSGod is right.
You may want to read this and/or that.
You are not going to like this answer.
You will not be able to use the BWToolkit.framework as-is. Some of its classes rely on private APIs which Apple has strictly forbidden for apps that are submitted to the app store.
For example, the developer ran a tool called class-dump on the AppKit.framework Mach-O object and generated the .h files for 4 secret classes: NSTokenAttachment (an NSTextAttachment subclass), NSTokenAttachmentCell (an NSTextAttachmentCell subclass), NSWindow (NSTimeMachineSupport), some additional methods on NSWindow, and NSCustomView.
I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of the framework, but depending on what classes you've made use of, it may be possible to create a custom build of the framework from the source that doesn't include the private APIs. Or, you could just include the source files for the classes you use in your project (provided of course that they don't rely on private APIs).
What particular classes did you make use of? If you used BWSplitView, you might look into using RBSplitView. (I talked to Rainer and have confirmed that there's no private APIs used in it, so you'd be okay).
Are there some particular library files available on OS/X that are relevant, I am just not sure where to start.
You'd probably want to use the QuickTime for that. There is some sample code that does this. However, it's not the nicest way to access metadata. The newer QTKit Framework somehow still requires you to fall back to the C-based APIs. There is another example from Apple embedding meta data writing into a Objective-C method. This might be the best starting point for you.
I believe i can learn thing or two if i can see the implementation files (.m files). Is there any way the i can view NSString.m or NSNumber.m files? and others? If i try to find these files using spotlight, i get nothing.
No, most (all?) of the Cocoa library implementations are only distributed in a compiled binary form. You could disassemble them, but that's probably against the Mac OS X EULA, and it also wouldn't help you understand them at all.
You could take a look at Cocotron, which is an open-source implementation of Cocoa. It won't be exactly the same, but at least for the core classes, it will be virtually identical.
Many of the basic cocoa classes, like NSString and NSNumber, are implemented in core foundation and "toll-free bridged" to objective-c classes. Core foundation is a C (not ObjC) API and the source is available as part of the Darwin open-source project.
So, to see how NSString or NSNumber is implemented under the hood, follow the link above and take a look at CFString and CFNumber, respectively (you'll need an Apple developer account, but registration is free).
Also worth looking at the mySTEP sources.
This helped me when doing something that subclassed NSMatrix some time ago.
I would guess they are already compiled into libraries.
I just did a quick check on my mac and could not find a NSString.m file as well. Are you utilizing Xcode's documentation? I find it has most everything I need.