Integration with third party libraries

Solar2D Native builds
#1

I have a potential upcoming project where I may need to integrate some third party code into my app. We are now Corona Enterprise Unlimited users, so we should be able to do just about anything.

The thing is, I don’t know anything about Objective-C because I’ve been working with these cross platform technologies like Corona and PhoneGap/Sencha Touch for the last several years.  Normally, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, but Objective-C looks intimidating because it’s so different.

We have a 3rd party company who has produced an iOS demo for us. My business partners want that demo integrated into an existing Corona-based app. The 3rd party company stated they would be open to creating a library I could use.

If anyone has any advice to share, I’d love to hear how you’d handle this situation. I currently see a couple of ways to possibly do it:

  1. Start from XCode and recreate my current project there, then add the library when it’s available. (I’m least comfortable with this.)

  2. Create a private hosted plugin that would be a wrapper around the 3rd party library, keeping my existing Corona project mostly intact with the exception of changing the build.settings to reference the new plugin, and code to call methods on the plugin. I feel like this would be better, but I don’t know if I’ll run into issues yet…

Dave

#2

Hi Dave, your second option sounds like the right option. Our plugins are designed around talking to 3rd party libraries and depending on the library, you might be able to do the programming in C++. Objective C is quirky to learn: sometime’s it’s C sometimes it’s Smalltalk. But the iOS SDK library is massive and very verbose.  But if your 3rd party can provide you the necessary API calls that can be called from C++ you should be able to map them to Lua pretty easily.

It might be worth sharing the Enterprise docs and the couple of tutorials we have with your vendor so they can have an idea of what our plugins look for.

Rob

#3

Thanks, Rob. I’m glad to know I might be on to something.

Thanks,

Dave

#4

Hi Dave, your second option sounds like the right option. Our plugins are designed around talking to 3rd party libraries and depending on the library, you might be able to do the programming in C++. Objective C is quirky to learn: sometime’s it’s C sometimes it’s Smalltalk. But the iOS SDK library is massive and very verbose.  But if your 3rd party can provide you the necessary API calls that can be called from C++ you should be able to map them to Lua pretty easily.

It might be worth sharing the Enterprise docs and the couple of tutorials we have with your vendor so they can have an idea of what our plugins look for.

Rob

#5

Thanks, Rob. I’m glad to know I might be on to something.

Thanks,

Dave