Devlog #7

While preparing the work for Xcode scheme support, we retouched some of the internal implementations to make it more testable, a big subject in the Gradle world. We are finishing the reimplementation of the Xcode models, the backbone of the build adapter. Performance bottlenecks were showing up during the configuration time. The refactor will unblock future work such as helping users to compare and merge Xcode projects, e.g. the dreadful pbxproj merge conflict. It will also help with malformed or badly crafted projects. The new implementation keeps track of already assigned Global IDs. Sometimes, we need to edit an existing Xcode project without breaking any potential reference to its elements. For this reason, we need to keep track of the PBXObject’s Global ID to reuse it when serializing the project again. Finally, properties that we believe do not affect the build process are generally not mapped in our models. However, we are skeptical that this may cause unintended side effects when editing projects as we remove those properties. The new implementation preserves all properties and their declared order, minimizing potential issues with Xcodebuild.

Testing Gradle plugins is a complicated subject. We already documented a possible solution at the beginning of the year but never got to perform actual experimentation. Since the last devlog, we finally did some exploration on that very solution. Unfortunately, we didn’t finalize a complete solution due to time constraints. However, we can successfully say the outlined solution is up-and-coming. The following steps are to split the work into mergeable PRs that would alleviate some of our pain, mainly tool selection and coverage assertion.

Through this work, we worked on our sample tests - our longest and most impactful tests - which we converted to JUnit 5 (from Spock). We cut down the execution time in half for those tests, thanks to JUnit parallel execution.