Chapter 4. Coding in Objective-C
Thus far, you’ve built a simple iPhone application and discovered that it’s not that hard to build apps for the iPhone or iPod touch. Let’s step back and take a broader look at the Objective-C language.
Objective-C is an object-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C. The language is a superset of the C language, providing constructs to allow you to define classes and objects. Once you get the hang of the Smalltalk-style syntax, if you’ve programmed in an object-oriented language before, things should look fairly familiar. However, there are some differences, and I discuss them in this chapter. One of the bigger differences, especially for those who are coming from a Java background, is in how Objective-C deals with memory management.
Declaring and Defining Classes
As is the case in almost all other object-oriented languages, in Objective-C classes provide the building blocks to allow encapsulation of data and methods that act on that data. Objects are specific instances of a class, and they contain their own instance data and pointers to the methods implemented by the class. Classes are specified in two pieces: the interface and the implementation. The interface contains the declaration of the class and is normally contained in a .h file. The implementation contains your actual code (the definition) and is normally contained in a .m file. We briefly discussed this in Chapter 3, but let’s take some time to look at it in more detail ...
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