Apple Previews Xcode 2

by , 3:15 PM EDT, June 28th, 2004

At today's Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple previewed Xcode 2, the update to its next generation suite of OS X application development tools. The release brings 64-bit development tools, an integrated reference library, and more. From the Apple press release:

Apple today previewed the next major release of Xcode, Apple’s powerful suite of developer tools, designed to make it even easier and faster to build innovative Mac OS X applications. The combination of a high performance UNIX-based development environment, a breakthrough user interface and outstanding performance technologies, has allowed Mac developers including Oracle, Sybase and Alias to deliver next generation Mac OS X applications. With the preview of Xcode 2, Apple is delivering a major update with support for 64-bit application development and even faster turnaround times for creating applications for Mac OS X.

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Xcode 2 also includes:

• 64-bit development tools to build data-intensive applications using 64-bit memory addressing;
• an integrated Apple Reference Library to offer a single search and presentation interface to all of Apple’s online and locally stored developer documentation;
• Apple’s enhanced version of GCC v3.5, the next generation of the industry-standard compiler;
• graphical remote debugging to display the debugging of data for full screen applications on remote machines;
• Auto Vectorization to automatically generate Velocity Engine-optimized code without requiring any source code changes;
• Ant build system support to make cross-platform development of Java applications even easier; and
• support for Subversion Source Code Management, in addition to supporting CVS and Perforce, to enable easy integration with a wide range of development infrastructure.

Xcode 2 will be include with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", the next major version of OS X, which will be available in the first half of 2005.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Apple seemed to have put some tasty new developer features into Tiger, and the new version of Xcode is equally good. With the company not bothering to advertise Mac OS X, it's good to at least see some great commitment to the needs of developers. The Mac OS was once a very difficult platform to develop for, especially if you were new to the platform, but Apple has all but erased any discrepancies between Windows and Mac OS X. We can not stress enough how important that is to the overall health of the platform.

Apple's Xcode 2