Cocoa® Programming

Object Orientation

Cocoa is a collection of objects. To understand how various languages use Cocoa, a brief explanation of objects and object orientation is needed. Object-oriented languages must use objects in a way that is compatible with Cocoa to be integrated with Cocoa. For example, Java is an object-oriented language that interfaces well with Cocoa. C++ is an object-oriented language that provides a model of objects incompatible with Cocoa.

The goals of object orientation are to make writing software easier, cheaper, and faster. The principal way that object orientation achieves its goals is through software reuse. The idea is that software can be organized into objects that are individually reusable. Each time a new software project begins, ...