Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Fourth Edition

Chapter 10. 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 10.1). This stream of bytes can then be sent across a network connection or written into a file. For example, when creating a NIB from the XIB file you edited in the Interface Builder editor, the compiler is archiving objects into a file. (Instead of “archiving,” a Java programmer would call this process “serialization.”)

Figure 10.1. Archiving

When you need to recreate the graph of objects from the stream of bytes, you will ...