Last week Steffen Frost invited me to hold a speech at the Parse User Group. Parse is a mobile App Platform for Developers. With parse the mobile developer don’t have to care about the server logic. He just have to use the Parse SDK. This SDK is handling seamless the communication with the parse backend. That is a pretty awesome solution.
We talked about keeping the versions current. Here is the MeetUp group:
http://www.meetup.com/parseusers/events/57471352/
12 people attended on MeetUp.com. We met in a coffee shop in SOMA close to the Market Street.
I presented VersionEye.com and hold a speech about Repository and Package Manager.
Some languages like Java, Ruby, Python and Node.JS have a package manager system. That helps a lot. In the Java World you can use Maven2 or Ivy. The Ruby guys are using RubyGems and the Python community is using PIP. And the Node.JS has NPM.
But most other languages don’t have a package manager. That means the software packages are spread out in the internet. The programmers have to download software artifacts with the browser and copy and paste it to the project. That is so much 1995!
We also talked about holding packages on GitHub as tagged version. But GitHub is a source control management tool, not a package manager. One important feature / constraint of a package manager is that a package that was uploaded one time can never ever be deleted or changed anymore! That is on GitHub not the case!
I like GitHub a lot, but I think to use it as a package manager is the wrong way.
We talked also about package manager for Object-C / iOS. CocoaPods is a package manager for Object-C. Unfortunately nobody didn’t know it at the Parse User group. I like the approach of CocoaPods. The only think I don’t like is that it is just using GitHub hosted files. I think a package manager should always be separated from SCM. But their can be a close integration.
We ended in a open discussion. The Parse guys told me they will take a look to CocoaPods and we will meet again and discuss how to improve the life of Object-C Developers. 🙂
Robert Reiz 