Lately, I’ve been exploring more of the open source community and examining how it is interacted with by the Objective-C community. I think that iOS and OS X developers tend to be afflicted by the “not invented here” syndrome, which is ironic considering Objective-C’s creators originally intended for compiled objects to be bought and sold as commodities.

This tendency to eschew open source software comes from the top, though: just look at how hard it is to integrate open source software in Xcode projects.

Recently, however, there is a new player in the open source iOS and OS X community: CocoaPods. This tool, written in Ruby, manages the dependencies and versioning of third party, open source libraries, integrating them into an Xcode workspace. Traditionally, this has been lot of work and a headache.

Many developers are sceptical of the tool – and rightly so. After all, this is a huge shift in the way we do our work and can demand a lot of time and effort – and therefore cost – in switching. That’s hard to swallow if you’re not completely convinced of the value of the tool.

Using CocoaPods means never having to worry about per-file compiler flags (e.g.: for ARC) again. It means not having to set linker flags or header search paths for every library you incorporate into a project. It makes upgrading libraries later a breeze. To me, that’s worth the amount of work it takes to get up and running.

However, there are drawbacks. Using CocoaPods makes it difficult to contribute back to open source projects (when compared with git submodules). CocoaPods represents another step to follow when cloning a repository, and the initial setup can be nontrivial. It’s also not perfect – the current version, 0.18.1, still has some bugs. 

CocoaPods is a maturing tool that’s come a long way and shows a lot of promise. If you’ve previously looked at the tool but passed on it, I would encourage you to look again. It’s a great way to easily incorporate lots of open source goodness into your project. As my friend Jason puts it, don’t think of it as “not invented here”, but rather “proudly discovered elsewhere.”