boltsframework/bolts-objc

Bolts is a small set of utility libraries for iOS and macOS app developers, originally built by the Parse and Facebook teams for their own apps and later released publicly. It contains two main components: a task system for managing asynchronous operations, and an implementation of the App Links protocol for handling deep links between apps. The task component, called BFTask, is a way to write code that runs in the background without turning your program into a tangle of nested callbacks. In mobile app development, many operations such as network requests, database reads, and file saves happen asynchronously, meaning the app keeps running while waiting for the result. Coordinating several of these operations in sequence or in parallel can become messy. BFTask gives you a structured way to chain those operations together, passing results from one step to the next, handling errors at any point in the chain, and running multiple tasks at the same time. The README compares it to JavaScript Promises. Compared to some built-in Apple threading tools, BFTask automatically releases completed work from memory, handles error propagation cleanly, and lets you arrange code in the same order it actually runs. The App Links component implements a shared standard for deep linking, which is the practice of one app opening a specific screen inside another app rather than just launching it to the home screen. Bolts makes it straightforward to both send and receive these deep links, and to fall back gracefully when the target app is not installed. The library works with both Objective-C and Swift. It can be added to a project via CocoaPods or Carthage, which are common dependency managers for Apple platform projects. No Parse or Facebook account is required to use it. Bolts is written in Objective-C and released under an open-source license. The repository is maintained by the BoltsFramework organization and documentation is available as an API reference linked from the README. The full README is longer than what was shown.