Home/ Questions/Q 4028644
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-20T11:14:44+00:00

I am new to objective-c/cocoa programming. I am making an application which is to

  • 0

I am new to objective-c/cocoa programming. I am making an application which is to constantly sync with a server and keep its view updated.
Now in a nutshell, heres what I thought of: Initiate an NSTimer to trigger every second or two, contact the server, if there is a change, update the view. Is this a good way of doing it?
I have read elsewhere that you can have a thread running in the background which monitors the changes and updates the view. I never worked with threads before and I know they can be quite troublesome and you need a good amount of experience with memory management to get most out of them.

I have one month to get this application done. What do you guys recommend? Just use an NSTimer and do it the way I though of…or learn multithreading and get it done that way (but keep in mind my time frame).

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Think about requirements. The most relevant questions, IMO, are :

    1. does your application have to get new data while running in background?
    2. does your application need to be responsive, that is, not sluggish when it’s fetching new data?

    I guess the answer to the first question is probably no. If you are updating a view depending on the data, it’s only required to fetch the data when the view is visible. You cannot guarantee always fetching data in background anyway, because iOS can always just kill your application. Anyway, in your application’s perspective, multithreading is not relevant to this question. Because either you are updating only in foreground or also in background, your application need no more than one thread.

    Multithreading is relevant rather to the second question. If your application has to remain responsive while fetching data, then you will have to run your fetching code on a detached thread. What’s more important here is, the update on the user interface (like views) must happen on the main thread again.

    Learning multithreading in general is something indeed, but iOS SDK provides a lot of help. Learning how to use operation queue (I guess that’s the easiest to learn, but not necessarily the easiest to use) wouldn’t take many days. In a month period, you can definitely finish the job.

    Again, however, think clearly why you would need multithreading.

    • 0