iOS Components and Frameworks: Understanding the Advanced Features of the iOS SDK

12. Core Data Primer

For many apps, being able to locally store and retrieve data that persists beyond a single session is a requirement. Since iOS 3.0, Core Data has been available to address this need. Core Data is a powerful object database; it provides robust data storage and management capabilities.

Core Data has its roots in NeXT’s Enterprise Object Framework (EOF), which was capable of mapping objects to relational databases. There are great advantages to writing business logic to objects, and not having to build database or persistence-specific logic. Mainly, there is a lot less code to write, and that code tends to be focused on the needs of the app rather than the needs of the database. EOF could support several brands of relational ...