Maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been using http://nodejs.org/ lately, but the lack of closures in Objective-C (iphone) has been really hard to work around.
For example, I’m creating service classes. Each service class can have several methods, each of which makes a different URL request. I can use the delegate pattern, but that means that I have to create a new service each time I want to call a method on it (because it has to store the delegate and selector for that request, and new method calls would overwrite them).
Even more difficult for me is the fact that I can’t easily keep local variables around in the scope for a callback. I have to store anything I want to send back to the delegate on the service class itself, which makes it harder to have more than one method on each class.
How do you pros do it? Should I just quit whining and do it another way?
Blocks, that were introduced into Objective-C recently, enable closures. The only problem is that you can’t use them on iPhone. Here comes 3-rd party solution, Plausible Blocks – they bring this capability on iPhone too.
Update: the sample project using blocks on iPhone can be found here.