Introduction

Archives and serializations are two ways in which you can create architecture-independent byte streams of hierarchical data. Byte streams can then be written to a file or transmitted to another process, perhaps over a network. When the byte stream is decoded, the hierarchy is regenerated. Archives provide a detailed record of a collection of interrelated objects and values. Serializations record only the simple hierarchy of property-list values.

You should read this document to learn how to create and extract archived representations of object graphs.

Organization of This Document

This programming topic contains the following articles: