- Cocoa is the descendant of NeXTStep and has a rich design history reaching back to 1987. Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C, an ANSI C compatible language with dynamic object-oriented extensions modeled on Smalltalk. It has been tailored for efficient development and runtime performance. Cocoa applications can make use of core functionality contained in traditional C and C++ libraries brought forward from legacy application environments. It also provides Java interfaces to permit a high performance, full featured Java development environment tailored to Mac OS X specifically.
- Cocoa is a set of object-oriented frameworks that support rapid development of Mac OS X applications. Cocoa is based on two frameworks: Foundation (Foundation.framework) and Application Kit (Appkit.framework). The API for these frameworks is written in Objective-C, an object-oriented extension to the C programming language. Objective-C is simpler and can be easier to learn than C++, but provides full access to all the power of the Mac OS X operating system. A Java API is also provided for the Foundation and Application Kit frameworks. There are additional Objective-C frameworks you can use with a Cocoa application; Java headers might not be available for all of these frameworks.
- The classes in the Foundation framework provide memory management, file-system services, dynamic loading of code, archiving of data, string handling, and a variety of other services that do not directly affect the graphical user interface. The classes in the Application Kit framework, on the other hand, provide the windows, controls, and I/O services that implement the Mac OS X look and feel.
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