Apple Inc.

John Graziano

Anders Bertelrud

Mike Ferris

Christian Molick

Building a software product in an integrated development environment using build styles. Applying a plurality of build styles, each of the build styles comprising a dictionary of build settings, to a target, determining an order of precedence for the build styles and other dictionaries containing build settings, and building a software product using said target and said build styles.

Method and apparatus for application building using build styles

The invention is directed towards methods and apparatuses for archiving and unarchiving objects. Some embodiments of the invention archive and unarchive objects that have global and user settings in multi-user environments. To archive objects, these embodiments identify which object settings are global settings and which settings are user settings. They store the global settings in an archive, and then store the user settings in another archive. To unarchive each object, some embodiments identify the object's settings in one or both archives. These embodiments instantiate the object, and retrieve its settings from the data archives and use the retrieved settings to define the values of the settings of the instantiated object. Some embodiments use key-value coding techniques to retrieve values and load values in an object. Key-value coding allows an archiving or unarchiving process to retrieve and load setting values for an object by using the setting names.

Method and apparatus for archiving and unarchiving objects

A method of building several software products using build styles. The method receives target settings including definitions for several build settings for directing build applications to build the several software products. The method receives build styles to build each particular software product. Each build style includes definitions for build settings for directing the build applications to build the particular software product. At least a first received build style inherits from a second build style. The method searches the build styles to identify a definition for a particular build setting by automatically retrieving the second build style to search for a definition for the particular build setting based on an inheritance relationship between the first and second build styles. The method generates final build settings for the particular software product by applying the definition of the particular build setting to the target settings without changing the target settings.

What is disclosed is a method of building a software product in an integrated development environment using several build styles and a target. The method includes (1) determining an order of precedence for the build styles, where each of the build styles comprises a dictionary of build settings; and (2) building a software product by applying at least one of several build styles to the target based upon the order of precedence. In various embodiments of the invention, the build settings within the build styles are capable of referring to other build settings and concatenating new values with previously defined values.

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Redwood City, CA, United States of America

John Graziano