Frameworks, categories and shared namespace

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Jun 7, 2008, at 5:22 AM, Christiaan Hofman wrote:

> So now to the main question. What is the proper way to avoid  
> conflicts in these situations? It seems to me that the obvious way  
> to define a (convenience) category in the usual way is actually  
> wrong in this situation. Some solutions I can think of is to define  
> method names starting with a unique prefix. It's a bit annoying  
> though. Another possibility is to use utility functions (with names  
> starting with a unique prefix) rather than methods in a category.  
> that's also a bit annoying, as you abandon the OOP. So what is the  
> proper way to work around this Obj-C limitation?

I use something like xx_ prepended to method names in that case, but I  
borrowed the idea from Apple.  Some of the runtime exploring tools  
show that there's an ABCompare protocol on NSObject, and that uses  
_abCompare as a prefix.  NSURL has a bunch of category additions with   
_web_ and _webkit_ prefixes.

If you're adding a lot of methods to an Apple-supplied class, I think  
it's preferable to use a subclass, framework or not (but that doesn't  
work with some objects, e.g. singletons).

-- 
Adam