Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide

Tiny.m Revisited

Now let’s take another look at Tiny.m . Here is the start of the Tiny.m program:

/* Tiny.m
 * A tiny Cocoa application that creates a window
 * and then displays graphics in it.
 */

Like any well-written program, Tiny.m begins with a set of comments describing what the program does. Objective-C supports the standard ANSI C style of comments. That means that anything enclosed between a /* and a */ is a comment. Anything on a line following a double forward slash (// ) is a comment as well. Thus:

/* This is a comment */
// This is a comment as well

The next line of Tiny.m imports the Cocoa header files for the Foundation and Application Kit frameworks:

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

This statement brings in the Objective-C class definitions for the entire Cocoa framework, including the Foundation and the Application Kit. Recall from earlier chapters that the Foundation is a collection of tremendously useful classes for managing strings, arrays, queues, and other traditional data structures. The Application Kit is the collection of classes that are used to display the graphical user interface; often called the AppKit, this framework includes the fundamental NSApplication, NSWindow, and NSView classes.

Tip

You might think that importing such a large number of files would slow down the compilation process. In fact, it does not, because all of the Cocoa headers are precompiled. As long as you #import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h> before you do anything else in your program, the required time ...