iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Taking a Look at Other Frameworks

So far, almost all of the things that I’ve talked about can be found in the UIKit framework, whose sole purpose in life is to provide a developer with all the classes an application needs in order to construct and manage its user interface. The UIKit framework does a majority of the heavy lifting for you, but developers don’t live by the UIKit framework alone; quite a few other frameworks get put into play as well. The next few sections give you a rundown of some of the other frameworks you may encounter.

The Foundation framework

The Foundation framework is similar to the UIKit framework in that it defines general-purpose classes. The difference is that whereas UIKit limits itself to classes that implement the user interface, the Foundation framework stakes a claim on all the other stuff — the non–user-interface stuff — you need in your app. In practical terms, this means that the Foundation framework defines basic object behavior, memory management, notifications, internationalization, and localization.

The Foundation framework also provides object wrappers or equivalents (for numeric values, strings, and collections) and utility classes (for accessing underlying system entities and services, such as ports, threads, and file systems as well as networking, and date and time management).

The CoreGraphics framework

The CoreGraphics framework contains the interfaces for the Quartz 2D drawing API and is the same advanced, vector-based drawing engine ...