Little hack to help with testing

Want the ability to switch in different test drivers, mock objects, or other test-specific behaviour? Here's a pattern I came up with (about a year ago) to do that in a GNUstep test tool, which can readily be used in Cocoa:

NSString *driverClassName = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] stringForKey: @"Class"];
Class driverClass = NSClassFromString(driverClassName);
id myDriver = [[driverClass alloc] init];

With a healthy dose of no, seriously, don't do this in production code, you now have the ability to specify your test driver on the command-line like this:

$ ./myTestingTool -Class GLTestDriver

This uses the oft-neglected behaviour of NSUserDefaults, in which it parses the executable's command-line arguments to create a defaults domain, higher in priority than even the user's preferences file. You can use that behaviour in a graphical app too, where it comes in handy when working in Xcode. It then uses a combination of the runtime's duck typing and introspection capabilities to create an instance of the appropriate class.