It is quite rare hacking as there is no problem receive certificate/provisioning profile from Apple using developer account or free provisioning. But there are moments when binary has to be signed during build time(kind of showstopper). In case when the binary is going to be shared with community it would be nice to keep personal account details not disclosed(these are included as part of signature). These cases are: binary distribution of Frameworks, plugins or application extensions. This post describes how to do self-signed provisioning and allow Xcode to use it.

Since iOS3 all system dylib/frameworks are combined into big cache file for performance reason. I needed these files to obtain export symbols from them for my future work on Windows/Linux support for RoboVM. There are several ways to get these.

New RoboPod Charts.framework, currently it is in testing. If there is an interest from community will create a pull request to MobiVM/RoboPods. Meanwhile it is available from my own maven repo for intermediate results altpods:

It was not big deal to for me binding framework with bro-gen (check tutorial) until I faced one Swift lib - Charts to be exact. It was problematic and exposed few robovm/bro-gen problems:

This post start series of technical notes that would help developers to understand changes were done to RoboVM. Table of content:

1. making RoboVM cross-platform
2. xib2nib
3. Codesign
4. Linker and tools
5. actool and
6. Pain and tears :)

Source codes for RoboVM part and toolchain has been released:

• Modified RoboVM github
• Toolchain github

Project depends on external projects that were forked and modified:

• cctools/ld64 fork github
• Microsoft/WinObjC fork github

Project that are used without changes on repo level (but patched during build):

• Facebook/Xcbuild github

Three month project is over and I can share the result. I built all missing components to make it able to develop iOS projects using Windows and Linux host.
First of all what it can’t:

2017 was quite effective for RoboVM as for me and there was lot of things introduced in it. I’m pleasured to contribute bunch of shiny things as well. But things change and in all RoboVM projects I was enrolled are winding down in 2018. This changes few moments for me:

History Debugger hangs due exception on ARM64 target when trying to resolve stack variables #239
Fix PR #240

Have almost never debugged ARM64 target (always used thumb7 as faster and smaller), but turned out that debugger is pretty broken. The reason is forgotten case:

History NPE not handled when Robovm used as SDK

Few finding when working with RoboVM built framework from XCode. Today there are two examples listed of how to build framework with RoboVM: