Major Features
Previously Xcode supported distributing a product build process over multiple systems. One technology involved was called Shared Workgroup Build, it used the Bonjour protocol to automatically discover systems providing compiler services, and a modified version of the free software product distcc to facilitate the distribution of workloads. Earlier versions of Xcode provided a system called Dedicated Network Builds. These features have been absent in the supported versions of Xcode.
Thanks to the Mach-O executable format, which allows for “fat binaries" containing code for multiple architectures, Xcode can build universal binaries which allow software to run on both PowerPC and Intel-based (x86) platforms and that can include both 32-bit and 64-bit code for both architectures. Using the iOS SDK, Xcode can also be used to compile and debug applications for iOS that run on the ARM processor.
Xcode also includes Apple's WebObjects tools and frameworks for building Java web applications and web services (previously sold as a separate product). As of Xcode 3.0, Apple dropped WebObjects development inside Xcode; WOLips should be used instead. Xcode 3 still includes the WebObjects frameworks.
Xcode includes the GUI tool Instruments, which runs atop DTrace, a dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems and released as part of OpenSolaris.
Read more about this topic: Xcode
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