Beginning Xcode®

Introduction

Welcome to Xcode. Xcode is Apple Computer's integrated development environment (IDE) used for writing, building, and testing programs to run on the Mac OS X operating system. Using Xcode, you can create a wide variety of applications, plug-ins, drivers, and frameworks using different technologies and languages. It includes tools to design, edit, analyze, debug, test, package, and distribute your projects. It can be used by an individual developer or to collaborate with a group of developers.

An IDE is the "glue" that gathers together and helps you manage all of the little pieces that are needed to produce modern software. It is entirely possible to edit, compile, link, bundle, and test your software without using an IDE. In fact, that was how software used to be developed—and still is, occasionally. You can edit your files with an editor, save them, run a compiler to compile the source, run a linker to link the object files into a program, and then start a debugger to test it. Most of these tools have little or no user interface, being driven almost exclusively from the command line. As applications become more complex, however, so do the tools needed to produce them. Even a "simple" project might employ a dozen different tools to create a working application. Using the correct tools, running them in the correct order with the correct arguments, managing the hundreds of intermediate files produced during this process, and doing this repeatedly and consistently becomes ...