Cocoa® Programming

Directory Services

Directory services are repositories for information about various services, machines, and clients on a network. They provide mappings from TCP/IP port numbers to processes and machine names to IP addresses. Directory services also aid network file systems and provide user identification and password verification.

Apple’s Directory Services APIs provide a layer of abstraction that helps Cocoa applications work regardless of the underlying network and directory services implementation. To do this, the Directory Services APIs support the development of plug-ins. Mac OS X version 10.1.3 provides a Directory Services plug-in for Apple’s own NetInfo service, and in future versions will fully support OpenLDAP and Microsoft’s Active ...