UXKit fork of Three20

[David Morford]

All,

First, I want to thank Joe again for sharing his work with Three20 and the Facebook applications that resulted. The Facebook 3.0 app demonstrates the potential of Three20.

For some time I have maintained a private fork of Three20 for use in my consulting development projects. This fork is used on several iPhone applications currently on the AppStore. I rearchitected the project including layout, building, code formatting and inline documentation to bring a higher level of maintainability to the source code. The goal was to allow simple integration with existing libraries and ease of use with new applications. I have been a full time Cocoa developer for seven years and tried to bring that experience with the toolset and technologies to the source code.

Now that Joe is moving on and the state of the project is unknown, I've decided to release my private fork. I've pushed the starting source code base from an export from my subversion server to GitHub and created a Google group.

The Readme on github contains a summary of the differences, changes and planned features. Most prominent on my radar is a rewrite of the entire model controller architecture to move it away from the single focus on URL request based data sources, starting with Core Data. The first push contains some of this code, although not usable as this point. I am pulling code from a complex Core Data "object store" class cluster I wrote similar years back for a GC-based Mac OS X app for Leopard.

GitHub:
http://github.com/davidmorford/UXKit

Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/uxkit

Cheers,
David

[Kevin Elliott]

David,

This is the kind of growth I love seeing in an open source project when said open project's state becomes unknown. (Although, it does beg to ask the question why these leaps in progress don't occur DURING the lifecycle of the project.)  This does seem to be very typical of open source projects. One or two people give birth to an awesome framework but don't have time to fully commit to it, and end up abandoning it for one reason or another, then someone comes forward saying they've made a major change and fork it. Would love to see this happen during the normal lifecycle of these projects, as I bet we'd see some incredible synergies form (and obviously possibly some friction too).

In any case, glad to see the fate of Three20 has already been reborn as another project by another developer. I do hope to see Three20 itself continue to be nurtured by Facebook (although I question their dedication to do so), because then we can see them borrow from each other.

Thanks for taking this on!

-Kevin

--
Kevin Elliott

Mused in the Apple iTunes App Store

[James]

This doesn't seem to be a complete git repository. I get failures on
building both from missing Vendor projects as well as resources in the
example projects. Thanks for keeping the project alive and I look
forward to utilizing and contributing.

[David Morford]

James,

The build structure of UXKit is VASTLY different than Three20 and likely very different than anything that anyone is currently using for iPhone OS development. The closest example might be how Stig Brautaset's JSON framework can be build using the sparse SDK method. The UXKit library is not a dependent project for the examples for a number of reasons. Build the UXKit library first and then the UXCatalog example and it works fine.

If anyone encounters problems, please take them on over to the uxkit google group.

Thanks!
David

[Justin Palmer]

Hey David,

Glad to see you've released your version. It's still way to early to
tell what will happen with the main Three20 project, but I'm glad to
see signs of life elsewhere.

I was able to build everything (although there were analyzer issues
reported) except the UXWebService example which seems to be missing
the JSON project files. Right now Vendors/ is empty...I suspect
that's where the JSON project should be?

Thanks
-Justin Palmer

http://alternateidea.com | http://labratrevenge.com | http://entp.com

[David Morford]

Thanks Kevin.

A quick note to all that I pulled and assembled the sources in the github repo out of my own subversion servers. The projects and structures are independent and do not use project references to force builds. This is simple to add and use but I do not prefer it in my own development workflow. The Build.command script is out of date from a set of far reaching changes I made to support the iphone os deployment target. After spending some time talking to Apple folks at the iPhone Tech Talk here in Seattle a week or two back.

To try it out, clone or grab the archive, build the UXKit library project FIRST and then the examples. The web service example will not build currently as it requires forks of JSON framework and DDXML that need cleanup before committing.

Cheers!
David

[David Morford]

Justin, just sent an email on this... will adding and push them later this evening.

Thanks!