Welcome to the Home Page of PList Compiler, a property list compiler for Xcode.

Description

PList Compiler is a property list compiler for Xcode, Apple's development environment. It lets you build localized and non-localized plist files from plc and ploc source files.

PList Compiler is a script that you execute as a Shell Script Build Phase within your Xcode project and which takes care of generating automatically the property list files for your packaged applications, bundles, frameworks, plugins, etc.

PList Compiler is both a free software and an Open Source project.

It is modelled on the CodeWarrior property list language: the idea of preparing source files and compiling them during the build process was introduced in CW Pro 8. It lets you have the property list files be automatically generated for you by the PLC compiler, substituting the right values during the building process, instead of having to manage manually hard-coded XML files. The Pro 8 version of CodeWarrior introduced a first draft of the plc language together with a dedicated compiler written by Josef W. Wankerl. Unfortunately Xcode (as of version 2.1) does not offer such a handy tool... (drumrolls) here comes PList Compiler!

Download

All PList Compiler official releases, past and present, are available in the download section of the project at SourceForge.

The most recent version is 0.6 which can be downloaded from this page

Warning: PList Compiler 0.6 is a fully functional and stable release. It has been thoroughly tested but there is certainly room left for improvements. Thank you for trying it and sending feedback.

Help

A help file with complete documentation about the PLC syntax and instructions about the usage of the compiler in an Xcode project is included in the distribution. You can also read it online.

Requisites

PList Compiler is written in fact in Tcl (the Tool Command Language): the executable script is a bash script called plcompile which magically redirects the instructions to tclsh which is the Tcl shell. Tcl is installed by default on OSX since version 10.3 (aka Panther) so tclsh is normally present on every MacOSX system starting from this version, and there should be nothing special to do for this script to run there. For version 10.2 systems (aka Jaguar), you will have to install Tcl on your machine: you can, for instance, get Daniel Steffen's Tcl Batteries Included distribution from there.

Source Code

PList Compiler is an Open Source Project. It is distributed under the same BSD License as the Tcl language itself: see the file License_terms in the distribution or the Open Source Initiative site.

The source code is public and can be found on the SourceForge site at the following address: http://sourceforge.net/projects/plistcompiler

Being written in Tcl (the Tool Command Language, see above), the code can easily be modified and adapted to suit your needs. Tcl/Tk is a very easy to use yet extremely powerful scripting language: see here for more about this language. No compiler is necessary. The code is directly executed by the Tcl interpreter.

The code is under Subversion control. You can retrieve the latest stage of development using any Subversion client. See instructions at: http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=149940

You can browse the Subversion repository online at http://plistcompiler.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/plistcompiler

Code contributions

If you have made modifications in the code in order to improve it and are willing to share them, I'll be glad to incorporate your contributions in the next release. PList Compiler is meant as a collaborative project.

Bug reports

Bugs can be officially reported via the Bug Tracker of the project. You can also use the tracker to send

Mailing list

For any questions, problems, suggestions etc. about PList Compiler, you can use the PListCompiler Users Mailing List. Click here to subscribe/unsubscribe. To post a message to the list, send email to plistcompiler-users@lists.sourceforge.net. To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the PListCompiler Users Archives.

You can also e-mail me directly: bdesgraupes@users.sourceforge.net

Last updated 2007-09-07 07:18:28

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