iOS Overview

Outline
• 1. Development Environment for iOS
• 2. Architecture of the iOS Environment
• 3. Architecture of an iOS Application
• 4. Application Life Cycle
iOS
Development Environment for iOS

• Operating system present on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices

• Manages device hardware and provides necessary technologies to
implement native applications
• Comes with a set of apps
Phone, Mail, Safari…
• Provides standard system services for the user
iOS SDK
Development Environment for iOS

• Contains the tools and interfaces necessary to develop, install, run

and test native applications created for an iOS device
• Native apps are built using
iOS frameworks
A programming language (Objective-C, and more recently Swift)
An Apple development environment
 MacOSX: OS Apple
 Xcode: Apple’s IDE
In a few words, iOS...
Development Environment for iOS

• Uses layered architecture

• Offers frameworks for manipulating system interfaces
• Offers developer's library
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

Core OS (OS X Kernel) Core Services

 TCP/IP  Networking
 Sockets  SQLite (Database)
 Power Management  Core Location
 File System  Threads
 Security  Address Book
 FileAccess
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

Media
 OpenAL (OpenAudio Library)
 Quartz / Core Graphics
 CoreAnimation
 Open GL
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

Cocoa is the API provided by Apple for Mac OS X application

development.

CocoaTouch is the API based on Cocoa, allowing the

development of mobile applications for:
 iPhone
 iPad
 iPod Touch…
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

CocoaTouch CocoaTouch
 UIKit (UI*)  Foundation (NS*)
 UI Controls  Utility & Collection classes
 Event Handling
 Hardware APIs
 Accelerometer
 Camera
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

 UIKit Framework
Use when implementing graphical element.
Press a button, resize an image, etc…)
The main elements:
Views, Controls, Controllers-Usually all that is visible is a view (UIView)
The user interface (UI) is managed by view controllers (UIViewController)
Layered architecture
iOS Architecture

 Foundation Framework
Extremely frequent use of these no-user-interface classes (no UI classes)
Press a button, resize an image, etc…)
 Examples:
 Collections :
 NSArray, NSMutableArray, NSDictionary, NSMutableDictionary…
 Values (Wrappers) :
 NSNumber, NSInteger, NSValue, NSString…
 Networking :
 NSURL, NSURLRequest…
View
Architecture of an Application
• Allows the user to interact with the application in a simple way
• Scene: Application screen
• Use of storyboards for the design and implementation of the
interface in a graphical environment
Controllers
Architecture of an Application
• iOS is based on event-driven programming
- The flow of the application is determined by events:
- System Events- User Events
- The response of the application to a user action is reflected
by the interface

• Event handling logic is defined in the

ViewController
- A ViewController for each ContentView
(Scene)
Controllers : Roles
Architecture of an Application
• Coordination of the flow of information between the model and
the views
• ContentView lifecycle management
• Management of device orientation changes
• Response to user interactions
• To connect between storyboard and code, they use:
 Action
 Outlets
 Controls
 Navigation Controllers
 Segues (Sequences)
Action
Architecture of an Application
-Action:
• A code linked to an event that can occur in your application
• When the event occurs, the code is executed
-An action can:
• Manipulate data
• Modify the user interface
• Trigger a treatment
- To define an action, you must create a method with a return
type IBAction and a sender parameter
• Sender: represents the object responsible for triggering the action
• IBAction: special keyword, indicating that the method is an action,
called from an element of the Interface Builder (IB)
Outlets and Controls
Architecture of an Application
- Outlet
• References the objects of an interface from the source code
• Create a property representing this object in the target ViewController file
• The property is of type IBOutlet
• Keyword indicating that this property is connected to an element of
the Interface Builder
-Control
• Graphic object with which a user can interact
• button, slider, switch
• Creation of a control event when a user interacts with a control, belonging to
one of these categories:
• drag and drop
• Editing
• Change in value
Navigation Controllers
Architecture of an Application
• Special View Controller, allowing you to manage the transitions between
the different Scenes of your application
• Will create a stack (LIFO) of the different ViewControllers it navigates
between, called: Navigation Stack
• The first element of the stack (scene that triggered the navigation), is called Root
View Controller (it is never removed from the stack)
• Other View Controllers can be added or removed from the stack, depending on the
user's navigation
• A Navigation controller also presents its own content, in particular the
Navigation Bar
• View at the top of the scene, providing navigation context
• Shows the location of the user in the navigation stack
• Defines a default Back button, allowing to return to the last item in the stack
• May contain other buttons, to be configured as you wish
Segue
Architecture of an Application
• A Segue (or sequence) represents a transition between two
ViewControllers: the source and the destination
Segue
Architecture of an Application
• Several types of Segues:
• Show
• Calls for new content to stack, on top of the current VC
• Show Detail
• Either stacks new content or replaces the current VC in the stack
(depending on the layout used)
• Present Modally
• Calls a child view, which hides the current view, to allow the user to
perform a particular action
• Unwind
• Navigates to a previous view in the stack, not necessarily
• Custom
• Creates a custom transition
Model
Architecture of an Application

• Represents a data structure and (optionally) business logic for the

consistency of this data
• Use of the Framework Foundation to represent the types handled by the
application
• Two categories of data types
• Value Classes: basic types (NSString, NSNumber, NSDate…)
• Classes collection: compound types (NSArray, NSSet and NSDictionary)
Application Execution States
Application Life Cycle
Application Execution States
Application Life Cycle