Along with all the fan fair for the new iPhone OS 3.0, there comes an updated license agreement for iPhone developers. Running a diff with the June 2008 license mostly reveals the expected stuff about pre-release software and the new features.
There is one little change that could impact game developers, in particular, in section 3.3.2:
“No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s).” (emphasis added)
In the past, it read “be downloaded and used”, which some had optimistically interpreted as to allow scripting languages like Lua, so long as the scripts were part of the distribution and not downloaded later.
Indeed, I have run across claims of games published to the App Store that embed Lua, and it is a feature of game engines like sio2.
Based on the license, using Apple’s own JavaScriptCore should be fine, which can be bridged with JSCocoa, or used in enhanced web applications with PhoneGap.
Apple also has changed the wording from “Published APIs” to “Documented APIs”, better clarifying which APIs are out of bounds.
Despite my nitpicking, overall, 3.0 looks to be a stellar release for this summer.
3 Comments
(Hello, I’m the JSCocoa dev)
Unfortunately JavascriptCore is not a documented API on the iPhone. It works if you handle it manually, copying header files from the Mac SDK and then fetching pointers to its functions. So I think it’s still out of bounds
That’s disappointing. I saw that you guys were having some issues with mprotect? What’s funny is that there was an emulator (Chip-8) just approved as per TouchAracde, and Frotz’s z-machine is up there.
Yes, mprotect is disabled on the iPhone. Tim Burks pointed me to a workaround : build a static pool of methods used at runtime to dispatch calls. Just needs to be coded
I didn’t know about the emulators. I guess the store validators don’t stick to the rules too much. That’s a good thing !