Understanding When to Use Cocoa - Cocoa

When OS X was introduced, it was a fusion of two operating systems: Apple’s MacOS 9 and NeXT OPENSTEP 4. Carbon came from the MacOS heritage and Cocoa from the NeXT side of the family. The APIs that became known as Cocoa date back to the early NeXTSTEP APIs.

In NeXTSTEP, most of the low-level programming was done in C, with a GUI toolkit written in Objective-C. This platform was very popular with the few developers who could afford it. Perhaps the most well-known piece of software to have been developed with this framework was WorldWideWeb, a simple program written by physicist Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN. This was the first ever web browser.

NeXT sold most of its machines to universities, and a few ended up at Stanford, where they were used to write HippoDraw, a statistical data analysis tool. When the authors wanted to port it to other platforms, rather than rewriting it, they wrote a compatibility library, libobjcX, which implemented the NeXT GUI functions on top of the X Window System. Another admirer of the systems was a hacker at MIT, Richard Stallman, who was inspired by NeXT system and based a number of parts of the GNU operating system on ideas from it.

The NeXTSTEP frameworks, with their strong focus on object orientation and GUI builder tools were among the first Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools. Around 1993, they attracted the interest of Sun Microsystems, which entered into a joint venture with NeXT to produce an improved version. The result of this collaboration was the OpenStep specification. OpenStep defined two libraries, the Foundation Kit and the Application Kit. The first contained core objects that would be useful to any program, while the second was aimed at GUI applications. Display PostScript was also specified, although few programmers used it directly.

The OpenStep specification was implemented on the next version of NeXTSTEP, which was renamed OPENSTEP (note the different capitalization) to reflect this. NeXT also began selling an implementation of it for Windows NT and Sun included an implementation with Solaris. Sun shifted their focus toward Java at around this time and largely abandoned OpenStep on Solaris. After the specification was released, libobjcX was adopted as a GNU project and renamed GNUstep. The GNUstep project implemented complete compatibility with the OpenStep specification some years ago. It now seeks to track changes introduced by Apple in Cocoa.

GNUstep received little attention during the NeXT years. Most people who
used OPENSTEP loved it, but few could afford the $499 price tag for the i486
version, or the $4999 price of the cheapest workstation NeXT sold. With the
release of Mac OS X, a lot more developers were exposed to OpenStep via Cocoa,
and GNUstep garnered increased attention. The NeXT heritage is still visible in Cocoa. Programs written for OpenStep will mostly compile out-of-the-box on OS X, although a few of the less common classes were removed. All of the Cocoa classes still have names that start “NS” for NeXT-Sun (the two companies involved in creating the OpenStep specification). Very occasionally, you will come across references to classes that date back to even earlier versions. These use the NX prefix, for NeXT. Apple has kept the NS prefix for the core Cocoa classes and uses framework-specific prefixes for other code.

Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)

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