Taking a Look at Other Frameworks
So far, almost all of the things that I’ve talked about can be found in the UIKit
framework, whose sole purpose in life is to provide a developer with all the classes an application needs in order to construct and manage its user interface. The UIKit
framework does a majority of the heavy lifting for you, but developers don’t live by the UIKit
framework alone; quite a few other frameworks get put into play as well. The next few sections give you a rundown of some of the other frameworks you may encounter.
The Foundation framework
The Foundation
framework is similar to the UIKit
framework in that it defines general-purpose classes. The difference is that whereas UIKit
limits itself to classes that implement the user interface, the Foundation
framework stakes a claim on all the other stuff — the non–user-interface stuff — you need in your app. In practical terms, this means that the Foundation
framework defines basic object behavior, memory management, notifications, internationalization, and localization.
The Foundation
framework also provides object wrappers or equivalents (for numeric values, strings, and collections) and utility classes (for accessing underlying system entities and services, such as ports, threads, and file systems as well as networking, and date and time management).
The CoreGraphics framework
The CoreGraphics
framework contains the interfaces for the Quartz 2D drawing API and is the same advanced, vector-based drawing engine ...
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