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Mr.KevinBabu

2010

Cocoa

Cocoa is an application environment for both the MacOS X operating system and iPhone OS, the operatingsystem used on multi-touch devices such as iPhone andiPod touch. It consists of a suite of object-orientedsoftware libraries, a runtime, and an integrateddevelopment environment

www.techalone.com

Cocoa

CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION

Cocoa is an application environment for both the Mac OS X operating system andiPhone OS, the operating system used on multi-touch devices such as iPhone and iPod touch.It consists of a suite of object-oriented software libraries, a runtime, and an integrateddevelopment environment

The Cocoa Environment

Cocoa is a set of object-oriented frameworks that provides a runtime environment for applications running on Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It is also part of a developmentenvironment that helps you efficiently bring these applications from design stage todeployment. Cocoa is the preeminent application environment for Mac OS X and the onlyapplication environment for iPhone OS. (Carbon is an alternative environment on MacOS X, but it is a compatibility framework with procedural programmatic interface intended tosupport existing Mac OS X code bases.) Most of the applications you see on Mac OS X andiPhone OS, including Mail and Safari, are Cocoa applications. An integrated developmentenvironment called Xcode supports application development for both platforms. Thecombination of this development environment and Cocoa makes it easy to create a well-factored, full-featured application.

Introducing Cocoa

As with all application environments, Cocoa presents two faces; it has a runtime aspectand a development aspect. In its runtime aspect, Cocoa applications present the user inter face and are tightly integrated with the other visible portions of the operating system; on MacOS X, these include the Finder, the Dock, and other applications from all environments. Butit is the development aspect that is the more interesting one to programmers. Cocoa is anintegrated suite of object-oriented software components—classes—that enables you torapidly create robust, full-featured Mac OS X applications. These classes are reusable andadaptable software building blocks; you can use them as-is or extend them for your specificrequirements. Cocoa classes exist for just about every conceivable development necessity,from user-inter face objects to data formatting, and where a need hasn’t been anticipated, youcan easily create a subclass of an existing class that answers that need.

Computer Engineering |IT Seminar TopicPage 2

Cocoa

Cocoa history

Cocoa is the continuation of several frameworks (primarily the

App Kit

and

Foundation Kit

) from the NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP programming environments developed by NeXTin the 1980s and 1990s. Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, and subsequently went towork on the Rhapsody operating system that was supposed to be the direct successor of OPENSTEP. It was to have had an emulation base for Mac OS applications, called

Blue Box

.The OPENSTEP base of libraries and binary support was termed

Yellow Box

. Rhapsodyevolved into Mac OS X, and the Yellow Box became Cocoa. As a result, Cocoa classes beginwith the acronym "NS" (standing either for the NeXT-Sun creation of OPENSTEP, or for theoriginal proprietary term for the OPENSTEP framework, NeXTSTEP): NSString, NSArray,etc. Much of the work that went into developing OPENSTEP was applied to the developmentof Mac OS X, Cocoa being the most visible part. There are, however, some differences. For example, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP used Display PostScript for on-screen display of textand graphics, while Cocoa depends on Apple's Quartz (which uses the PDF imaging model).Cocoa also has a level of Internet support, including the NSURL and WebKit HTML classes,and others, while under OPENSTEP there was only rudimentary support for managednetwork connections through NSFileHandle classes and Berkeley sockets.Prior to its current use, the "Cocoa" trademark was the name of an application thatallowed children to create multimedia projects. It was originally known as KidSim, and isnow licensed to a third party and marketed as Stagecast Creator. The program wasdiscontinued in one of the rationalizations that followed Steve Jobs' return to Apple. Thename was re-used to avoid the delay while registering a new trademark, with Stagecastagreeing to market the older Cocoa under a new name.