---

What Is Cocoa?

Cocoa is one of the application environments of the Mac OS X operating system, a peer environment to Carbon and Java. It consists of a suite of object-oriented software libraries and a runtime, and it shares an integrated development environment with the other application environments.

This chapter expands on this definition, describing the purpose, capabilities, and physical form of Cocoa. Reading this functional description of Cocoa is an essential first step toward understanding Cocoa as a developer.

Contents:

The Cocoa Environment
Features of a Cocoa Application
The Development Environment
The Cocoa Frameworks
A Bit of History

---