COCOA PROGRAMMING FOR MAC OS X SECOND EDITION

Chapter 8. Archiving

While an object-oriented program is running, a complex graph of objects is being created. It is often necessary to represent this graph of objects as a stream of bytes, a process called archiving (Figure 8.1). This stream of bytes can then be sent across a network connection or written into a file. For example, when you save a nib file, Interface Builder is archiving objects into a file. (Instead of “archiving,” a Java programmer would call this process “serialization.”)

Figure 8.1. Archiving

When you need to recreate the graph of objects from the stream of bytes, you will unarchive it. For example, when your application starts ...