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What’s the hassel about?
Apple hasn’t updated the DotMac framework for quite a long time. For more than 2 years. Several months after introducing the DotMac to MobileMe transition, there still isn’t any sign of a MobileMe framework to be used by developers, yet Apple’s using its own private MobileMe framework. Here is a howto for using the MobileMe framework.
What will I need?
Of course, you’ll need Xcode tools and ObjC knowledge, apart from that a piece of Apple’s software with the MobileMe framework (e.g. iPhoto) and our FCMobileMe framework which is a wrapper around the header files. The header files were generated by class-dump command line tool.
Steps
Download the FCMobileMe framework and extract the MobileMe framework from some of Apple’s apps and add those to your project and don’t forget adding them to the Copy Frameworks phase (if you’re not familiar with this, google for ‘Xcode adding framework’).
You may now #import anywhere in your project. The usage is similar to the usage of DotMac kit, which you can download from http://connect.apple.com/ – including a manual. What differs mostly are the class names, which now mostly start with ‘MM_’ – so the classes you should concentrate on are MM_MMiDiskSession, MM_MMMemberAccount and MM_MMTransaction.
Why
Why should you use this weird unofficial way when the old DotMac framework actually does work? There are several reasons:
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We decided to change the way we are serving our store and other websites. Fuelcollective.com hosts all the app sites and the store, so it’s important to us that the site is fast, reliable, and efficient.
Our first thought was to have one server that had a lot of RAM that could run all our apps that are in PHP and Ruby on Rails. This worked except memory usage was becoming an issue. We have to run MySQL, PHP, and Ruby (enterprise) and all of those things require a lot of resources.
So as of this week, FueCollective got its own server to use with no PHP installed, just Ruby and MySQL. So far we have seen much improved performance and less resources being used by each server. On top of that, it was actually cheaper to do it this way since the other server can run on a much smaller server. We really only needed the power for the FuelCollective Server.
I’m going to try to write some more geeky articles and possibly be more technical so those with similar issues may get helped by coming across our blog. If you have any questions, please leave a comment.
