[SpiraMira]

Hi -

What is the state of the OIF framework? As stated in some previous posts, I am developing some imaging products for iOS and this framework has some interesting abstractions and features like the CG image rep, processors etc..But lots of "finish porting" comments so I'm wondering if it's worth the time to learn and extend. It also depends on Networking which I gather you are or have already phased out (not yet figured out why it's linked to OmniNetworking anyway)

Thanks in advance.

[Tim Wood]

OIF is probably on the way out. As you note, it's only been minimally ported to 64-bit. The link to OmniNetworking is likely legacy we should be removed -- OIF uses to be the place that image loading happened for OmniWeb, but that's all in WebKit now.

[Tim Wood]

Oops; I spoke to quickly after only a cursory searching in the source. OIF directly links OmniNetworking but indirectly uses it through OWF. Older versions of the Mac OS X build tools required that you directly link frameworks that you used indirectly in some cases (when doing the @executable_path goop, if I recall).

Still, removing the direct link of OIF->OmniNetworking won't remove the dependency unless the OWF dependency is removed.

[Ken Case]

The basic processing architecture of OWF (which is what OIF uses) doesn't need OmniNetworking; it's only used by some of the specific OWF processors (such as those which implement HTTP and FTP).

OIF, OWF, and OmniNetworking are mostly obsolete: the networking APIS became obsolete when Apple provided Cocoa APIs for talking to web servers, and the image processing layers became obsolete when Apple provided Cocoa APIs for incremental loading of image formats like JFIF and PNG. You're still welcome to pick them over for any useful techniques, of course, or to even adopt them wholesale. But we're not actively developing them anymore.

(OWF and OmniNetworking are still lightly maintained: OmniWeb still uses OWF to load files from the ftp and gopher protocols, to save synchronized bookmarks to WebDAV servers, and to process cookies. And last I checked there wasn't really a Cocoa API equivalent to OmniNetworking, so it's still handy for writing low-level networking protocols—though it's definitely showing its age at this point, since it predates NSError.)