[THRIFT-3041] Generate asynchronous clients for Cocoa

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.9.3
• Component/s: Cocoa - Compiler, Cocoa - Library
• Patch Info: Patch Available
• Assignee: Jens Geyer
• Reporter: Mike Riley
• Created: 15/Mar/15 18:27
• Updated: 30/Apr/15 18:57
• Resolved: 16/Apr/15 20:15

Description

I've been using thrift on a decent variety of iOS projects for the last ~4 years. Every time I set a new project up, I invariably end up inventing some way to invoke thrift RPC calls via Objective-C block syntax. I usually end up ripping apart the generated classes by declaring their private methods, and then writing a bunch of boilerplate all so that I can avoid using the provided HTTP client, which makes synchronous requests.

This is a decent stab at letting the generator take care of this problem for me, and everyone else. It ended up being pretty heavy handed with t_cocoa_generator.cc, but I've spent a while testing this and am pretty confident I managed to avoid breaking anything. I realize this is a large change, so I've put up the sandbox I was using to test on github if that makes it easier to review. If you want the tl;dr; about what practical changes this has on generated sources:

https://github.com/yelirekim/thrift-cocoa-love/blob/master/thrift-cocoa-love/ViewController.m
https://github.com/yelirekim/thrift-cocoa-love/blob/master/gen-cocoa/asdf.h

I'd welcome feedback or proposed modifications if this approach isn't quite right.