Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

12 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 12.1). 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 Interface Builder, the compiler is archiving objects into a file. (Another commonly used term for this process is “serialization.”)

Figure 12.1  Archiving

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