Introduction to Stream Programming Guide for Cocoa

A stream is a fundamental abstraction in programming: a sequence of bits transmitted serially from one point to another point. Cocoa provides three classes to represent streams and facilitate their use in your programs: NSStream, NSInputStream, and NSOutputStream. With the instances of these classes you can read data from, and write data to, files and application memory. You can also use these objects in socket-based connections to exchange data with remote hosts. You can also subclass the stream classes to obtain specialized stream behavior.

Organization of This Document

This document includes the following articles:

See Also

You may find the following external resources helpful if you are implementing socket-based network streams: