Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third 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 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 10.1. 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 ...