Ice Touch 1.3.1 Release Notes

Ice Touch offers C++ and Objective-C SDKs for building iOS and Cocoa applications. Ice Touch also includes an Objective-C run time for use in OS X  applications.

The Ice Touch distribution does not include any Ice services, but its support for the complete Ice protocol means that your Ice Touch applications can work seamlessly with existing Ice servers as well as Ice services such as IceGrid, Glacier2, and IceStorm.

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New features in Ice Touch 1.3

This section outlines changes and improvements in this release that may affect the operation of your applications or have an impact on your source code.

For a detailed list of the changes in this release, please refer to the CHANGES file included in your Ice Touch distribution.

Support for Ice 3.5 features

Ice Touch is based on the Ice 3.5.1 release. For more information see the Ice 3.5.1 Release Notes.

Changes and fixes in Ice Touch 1.3.1

  • Ice Touch now requires Xcode 5
  • Updated Ice Touch to support iOS 7

  • Added support for SOCKSv4 proxies, which allows outgoing TCP & SSL connections using IPv4 to be mediated by a network proxy service. Note that the iOS simulator doesn't support SOCKS proxies.

  • Objective-C applications can now use libc++ or libstdc++, with libc++ the default when targeting iOS 7.

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Corresponding Ice release

The Slice definitions included in Ice Touch 1.3 are the same as the Slice definitions included in Ice 3.5.1. In particular, the Glacier2, IceGrid, and IceStorm client libraries included in this Ice Touch release use the Ice 3.5.1 definitions. If a future Ice release adds new APIs (such as a new operation, or a new interface) to one of these services, you will need to rebuild these libraries using the newer Slice definitions in order to use the new APIs.

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Deprecated features in Ice Touch 1.3.1

The SDKs for Objective-C and C++ provide support for libc++ and libstdc++, but libc++ is now preferred.

For OS X and Cocoa, the Ice Touch run time is no longer built with garbage collection support. The use of automatic reference counting (ARC) is now preferred over garbage collection. If you need garbage collection for your Ice Touch OS X applications, you will need to build Ice Touch from source.

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Known problems in Ice Touch 1.3.1

On iOS devices, connection establishment occasionally hangs when using the SSL transport. This problem occurs in particular with the Ice Touch test suite which opens a large number of connections over the loopback interface. We have never experienced this problem outside the test suite environment. If you are using the SSL transport, we recommend setting the Ice.Overidde.ConnectTimeout property to a reasonable timeout value to work-around this issue. If you built Ice Touch from source and run the tests with SSL enabled, you might experience some test failures because of this issue. We have submitted a test case to Apple to try to solve this problem.

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Upgrading your application from previous Ice Touch versions

ZeroC does not guarantee binary compatibility between Ice Touch 1.3 and previous Ice Touch versions, therefore you must recompile your Slice files and rebuild your application. 

Xcode project settings

For Xcode iOS and Cocoa applications, you need to update the project setting "Additional SDKs" to match the location of the new Ice Touch SDK installation. You should use:

  • /Library/Developer/IceTouch-1.3/SDKs/ObjC/$(PLATFORM_NAME).sdk for the Objective-C SDK
  • /Library/Developer/IceTouch-1.3/SDKs/Cpp/$(PLATFORM_NAME).sdk for the C++ SDK

If you're not using the Cocoa or iOS SDKs but rather the command-line SDK, you will need to update the "Ice Home" setting.

Command line SDK settings

The command line SDK is installed in /Library/Developer/IceTouch-1.3. The install name of the Ice Touch shared libraries is prefixed with @rpath/. You will need to change your build system accordingly. Specifically, you will need to link your executable with -Wl,-rpath,/Library/Developer/IceTouch-1.3/lib if you want the Ice Touch shared libraries to be located without having DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH set.

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Ice Touch feature set

Ice Touch supports the following features:

Ice Touch currently lacks support for the following Ice features:

  • Protocol plug-ins
  • Local interfaces
  • Ice::Application and Ice::Service helper classes

The Objective-C mapping currently lacks support for the following Ice features:

  • Asynchronous method dispatch (AMD)
  • Collocation optimization
  • Servant locators

Ice Touch has limited support for:

  • SSL
    See below for more information.
  • UDP
    On iPhone, UDP requests do not transparently establish a 3G/Edge connection. 

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SSL support

Ice Touch for OS X and Cocoa uses the Ice for C++ SSL protocol plug-in.

For iOS devices, Ice Touch SSL provides only a subset of this functionality. Due to limitations in iOS SSL support, the following restrictions apply:

  • Ice Touch servers cannot authenticate SSL clients.
  • Clients on iOS 5 and later reject server certificates that use MD5 hashes.

Furthermore, the semantics of some IceSSL configuration properties have changed, and new properties have been added. The IceSSL property reference provides complete details.

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Logger notes

Objective-C applications must install custom loggers via ICEInitializationData. You cannot use any of the Ice for C++ logger properties, such as Ice.UseSyslog, and you cannot install a custom logger with a plug-in (Ice.Plugin.*).

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Memory management

Graphs of objects with cycles 

With the introduction of automatic reference counting (ARC), you no longer need to explicitly retain and release parameters or class members. However, you are still required to explicitly break cycles, otherwise graphs of objects containing cycles will leak. Consider this Slice definition:

Slice
class Foo
{
    Foo next;
};

Suppose we use these definitions as follows:

Objective-C
Foo a = [[Foo alloc] init];
Foo b = [[Foo alloc] init];
a.next = b;
b.next = a;

If you send this graph over the wire, your application will leak memory unless you somehow retain the graph and manually break the cycle.

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Auto release pool

The Ice run time creates an NSAutoReleasePool object before dispatching server-side invocations and client-side AMI callbacks. The pool is released once the dispatch is complete.

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Targeting iOS >= 5.1.1

Xcode 5 targets iOS 7 by default. To build your application for an iOS >= 5.1.1 target, you will need to modify your Xcode project as follows:

  • Set the Xcode Deployment Target property to the desired iOS version.

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