Overview

From the large architectural and application overview of the previous chapter, this chapter moves to the lowest level: the building blocks and basic types of Cocoa and Carbon. It starts by outlining the steps you can take to create a data strategy and ways that you can use this strategy to help you build a prototype and then progressively more complete versions of your application.

Next, you will find an introduction to the basic types of Mac OS X, along with information about how to create them programmatically. (There are significant differences between Cocoa and Carbon as well as between Java and Objective-C.)

Among the most useful building blocks of Mac OS X are collections arrays, dictionaries, and sets. These can be immutable (that is, they are of fixed size and contents), or they can be mutable. All are described here.

Property lists provide a convenient way of storing information; they work together with XML to manage information without your needing to worry about formats and field widths. They are implemented using the dictionaries described in this chapter.

Preferences (Carbon) and defaults (Cocoa) pull together even more of these technologies to help you provide customization for specific applications, specific users, and specific computer environments.

A section showing you how to create objects in Objective-C and Java concludes the chapter.

Creating a Data Strategy

Data modeling, data strategy, and normalization are all terms that refer to the same basic concept: creating a coherent view of the data in your project. As...