Cocoa

From RemObjects Software

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Cocoa is Apple Inc's native object-oriented application program environment for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of five major application programming interfaces (APIs) available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon (API)|Carbon, Macintosh Toolbox|Toolbox (for the obsolete Classic (Mac OS X)|Classic environment), POSIX (for the Berkeley Software Distribution|BSD environment), and Java platform|Java. (Environments such as Perl and Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]] are considered minor environments because they are not generally used for full-fledged application programming.)

Cocoa applications are typically developed using the development tools provided by Apple, specifically Xcode (formerly Project Builder) and Interface Builder], using the Objective-C language. However, the Cocoa programming environment can be accessed using other tools, such as Pascal, Python, Perl and Ruby, with the aid of bridging mechanisms such as PasCocoa, PyObjC, CamelBones and RubyCocoa, respectively. It is also possible to write Objective-C Cocoa programs in a simple text editor and build it manually with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) or GNUstep's makefile scripts.