Understanding When to Use Cocoa

To understand why you would choose to use Cocoa, it is necessary to briefly explain the alternatives. Apple supports three principal software development environments for producing Mac OS X applications. The supported environments are Cocoa, Carbon, and 100% Pure Java. Each environment has strengths and weaknesses, and a developer’s choice of environment is influenced by many factors.

Carbon

Carbon consists primarily of a subset of the traditional procedural Application Programming Interfaces (API)s used to program Mac computers. Apple updated, and in some cases, enhanced the C libraries used to program Macs before OS X. Carbon provides access to the modern and powerful features of OS X in a way that preserves ...

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