Archive for object oriented programming

I/O Kit Tools for iPhone and iPad

IO Kit is used for interfacing the different devices just as you are working on the particular operating system. In fact it’s a sort of trainer on which you work for your applications. In this way you can program different devices to work the way you want for the purpose of developing different applications. Mostly we develop the device drivers in a high level language like objective C. To follow are some of the important tools for iPhone and iPad which might be of help to you for developing the device drivers.

Prerequisites Required

Before you start developing device drivers you should have a know how of C++ and kernel programming. You have to be more creative in your approach towards programming using I/O kit tools.

Salient Features

The I/O kit is provided with plug n play, sleep mode, separate memory banks for kernel and user applications, parallel and symmetric multiprocessing and it provides a lot of room for code reusability.

The kernel features supported by these drivers are objected oriented programming framework, primitives for communication, data management and threading. It is compatible with all bus types. Instantiated objects that belong to different classes are tracked through I/O registry. Layering of client and provider objects can be done without a fuss; no matter how complicated the order is. There is a great room for code reusability in the latest model of the I/O kit.

Blueprint Philosophy

The latest model of the I/O kit is different to its predecessors in a lot of ways. The available models before this were deficient in one way or the other. Many features of a modern operating system for example power management, driver stacking, automatic configuration etc. were absent in the previous models.

The crux of the design philosophy lies in the fact that object oriented programming model was developed. This architecture supports many devices with a way that is common among them. In the earlier versions this kit software development kits were separate entities but now the hardware is so much sophisticated that there is no requirement of complex codes. Application programming interface is open to all, resulting in facilitating the developers to use the source code for developing new drivers.

Provision of Namespaces

Name spaces are always helpful in identifying the classes. Therefore you should always try to use them and a reverse chronological order is preferred. Be cautioned never to declare an I/O subclass in namespace.

High Level Language Used

The programming language used is C++. However not every feature of this language is usable.  There were many features in C++ that don’t suite a multithreaded environment resulting in their exclusion.  As a programmer you cannot play with exceptions, templates and multiple inheritance. The I/O kit possesses its own runtime typing system so no need for C++ to provide that.

Different parts of the I/O kit are described as below:;

Libraries Provided

Three C++ libraries are used by I/O kit. These are cloaked by framework. There are three frameworks used in all. These are IOKit, kernel IO kit and kernel libkern. Read More