ObjectToXPC is a small open source project I hacked together today. It simplifies the conversion between a few Objective-C classes and the “new” XPC objects. The library also comes with unit tests which covers quite a few scenarios, woop woop!

So that might be cool but what is XPC? XPC is new technology from Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 (not publically available in iOS). It allows you to separate your application in different logical parts – services. These services all run as individual processes. Furthermore, each logical part can have a unique set of sandbox privileges. For example you can have one XPC service for network based communication and another for creating a ZIP-file of some downloaded data. Thus the technology can help yoy make your application more stable and secure.

Supported Types

ObjectToXPCsupports a few basic Objective-C classes and most XPC Object types.

Objective-C

ObjectToXPCwill allow you to convert instances of the following Objective-C classes to and from XPC Objects;

• NSArray (where the elements are one of the supported),
• NSData,
• NSDate,
• NSDictionary (where the elements are one of the supported, keys must either be of the NSString class or define the -description method),
• NSNull (only in collections),
• NSNumber,
• NSString.

If you try to convert an NSArray or a NSDictionary instance which contains an object which we can not convert (i.e. if the method -XPCObject is not implemented) the project will halt via an assertion. But only if the DEBUG macro has been set. Otherwise an error will only be logged to the console via NSLog() and program execution will continue with the object being skipped.

XPC Objects

The following types of XPC Objects can be converted to and from the previously mentioned Objective-C classes (via for example -initWithXPCObject:);

• XPC_TYPE_ARRAY,
• XPC_TYPE_BOOL,
• XPC_TYPE_DATA (to and from NSNumber),
• XPC_TYPE_DATE,
• XPC_TYPE_DICTIONARY,
• XPC_TYPE_DOUBLE (to and from NSNumber),
• XPC_TYPE_INT64 (to and from NSNumber),
• XPC_TYPE_UINT64 (to and from NSNumber),
• XPC_TYPE_NULL,
• XPC_TYPE_STRING.

Get the Code

You can find the project and the glorious source code on the GitHub project page. Feel free to fork, add and fix stuff which I have missed or forgotten. Feel free to send me a pull request, I will happily intergrate it (if it looks OK)! The Xcode project file currently contains one dynamic library target and one unit test target.

To use it you can either link with the library or copy the source files manually into you project. You need all the .h and .m files found in the Source directory in case you opt for the latter case. As the XPC API was introduced in OS X 10.7 the project requires OS X 10.7 or newer, big suprise there. This is required both for building the project (with Xcode 4.2+ and ARC turned on) as well as running it. ObjectToXPC will not build for, or run on, the iOS platform as XPC Services does not exist (publically) on it.

License

The project is licensed under the “Simplified BSD license” (2-clause), for the exact terms please see the LICENSE file in the repository.

Bugs and Other Reports

Please file any bug reports in the issue tracker for ObjectToXPC on GitHub or even better fix it and then send me a pull request, also via GitHub.

Have you created an application which use any of my open source projects (including ObjectToXPC)? Please tell me about it. Not because you have to but because I would love to know! My contact details are available on my about page.