In addition, I think license verification should be moved to the command line builders - this way we don't need to have the IDE installed to use the command line compilers; this would allow us to create cross-platform IDEs.
Now, I using AZURE PIPELINES to Continuos Integration and works perfectly, look:
Everytime when I commit my source code, the Pipeline do everything for me: Get the Code, Compile, Sign, push to our servers and you can also publish automatically to Stores.
You can use xcodebuild from the command line to build the project. As I wrote the building process is quite complicated and you will need to deal with setting the default keychain and signing the code. If Swift libraries are included then it is much more complicated.
@Erel do you have any minimum example to compile and create the .IPA from xcodebuild ?
Is very important thing to automatically compile when you want to put on Continuous integration, if you do that, is a very very improvement to all users, they don't need to worry about compile, just coding!
I thought in put the improvement on the same IDE, as others do. Like: C:> B4i.exe <complete path of b4i project> /release /configuration:xxxxx (and the rest get the default values of projet) if have this parameters, just not open the IDE and after this, close the IDE
The biggest hurdle would be licensing though that could be solved by having the compilers handle licensing rather than the IDEs. Another hurdle is the designer but there are various solutions I could see using.
I just need to make the continuos delivery works! for example when we commit/push the code to github, automatically the server start to build the apps, publish, etc. Is working fine with B4A because have the command line to do this, but nit for B4i