It's been a rough week. I've learned a lot, but that doesn't diminish the frustration. Looking back, there are probably some shorter paths I could have taken, but that's easy to say now.
My first task was to get my iOS app set up for continuous building on Travis. Thankfully they recently added support for objective-c. The setup is really simple. You add a single line to the config specifying your language is objective-c. That went pretty quickly, as you would suspect. The next part didn't.
My first build gave me certificate errors when Travis tried to run xcodebuild. "That's weird," I said to myself. I was surprised because running my build locally was pretty smooth. So I tweaked something, committed, and error. Tweak, commit, error. Towards the end of the day, I found my issue.
It turns out that xcodebuild will use the specified version of the sdk you want and will try and build it for the device, which of course needs to be signed. The way around this is to specify iphonesimulator, and a version if you want, with the -sdk flag. I submitted an issue to Travis and in the meantime copied their script and modified it by hand.
That wasn't the only issue I had with Travis. My next issue was a linking error where it couldn't find libOCDSpec2.a and thus couldn't build my application. I should have gotten to the fix earlier. Thirty-five builds later, I had a working solution.
For some reason, xcodebuild was not finding and building the OCDSpec2 project, so that lib file wasn't being generated. I still don't know why, but there's a fix. I compiled the project manually and copied that file into my project and linked against that one. Problem solved, but if OCDSpec2 updates I'll have to repeat the process.
My second task was to add Fitnesse testing into my project. Thankfully Eric Meyer had templates for XCode made for this. I missed a crucial step when I cloned his project though. I forgot to clone the submodule. This lead to about an hour or two of trial and error before I realized something. The files that the template copied into my project were blank. Something was wrong. Thankfully adding the submodules fixed the issue pretty quickly.
I was able to complete all three stories for my ipm on Wednesday. Thankfully the spike of Franklin (my http server) and Tic-Tac-Toe played on an iOS app took less time than expected. During the meeting, I got my next batch of stories. End-to-end player vs player and a gameover message.
The player vs player story is what I'm struggling with right now. It feels gigantic. I have to wire up Franklin, TTT, and iOS with unit tests and Fitnesse tests. It sounds like a lot, at least to me, considering I'm relatively new to iOS. Today was spent trying to get the interface setup with a view and then I worked on how the iOS app would talk to the server. I made some progress there and hopefully once that's done it'll start falling into place.
If this post sounds a little upset, it's probably because it's been a frustrating week. For a majority of it, I fell like I've been fighting software instead of writing code. That started to change this afternoon though. Hopefully now that I've gotten all this out, I can continue making progress tomorrow. If nothing else, I'm going to try and be better about my estimates.
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