Cocoa® Programming Developer’s Handbook, Second Edition

Chapter 10. Core Data

Core Data is a new API in 10.4 that provides a persistent data model and a data-object mapping layer. It is based (loosely) on the older Enterprise Object Framework, which provided an object-relations mapping for WebObjects.

iPhone

The Core Data framework is currently not available for the iPhone. Using it will limit your application to the desktop, although it can save you a lot of work. If you think you might want to port your application to the iPhone, consider using Core Data for prototyping; don’t make explicit use of any of its advanced features and make sure you can replace it later with manual implementations of your model objects.

Using Core Data, a lot of the code we wrote in the last chapter becomes obsolete. ...