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Feature
The Core Foundation
Learn to use a useful suite of Mac OS X services
Issue: 2.3 (December/January 2003)
Author: Thomas Reed
Author Bio: Thomas Reed has been programming as a hobbyist for more than 20 years, and fell in love with the Mac in 1984.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,635
Starting Page Number: 30
RBD Number: 2313
Resource File(s):
2313.sit Updated: Thursday, December 18, 2003 at 9:58 AM
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.tildesoft.com/Plugins.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/
http://www.tildesoft.com/Plugins.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
In Mac OS X, Apple provides a useful set of objects and utility routines to handle basic data that nearly every application will use. This group of services is called the Core Foundation. The Core Foundation defines classes for holding strings, numbers, Booleans, arrays, dictionaries, and other data types. Some of the provided routines create and parse property list data, create and parse generic XML data, and interact with bundles. The practical value of these routines is great, and a discussion of the entirety of the Core Foundation is far beyond the scope of a single article. In this article, I will focus on implementing a few of these data types and routines in REALbasic, primarily for the purpose of reading and writing property list data. This column assumes you are familiar with using declare statements to call OS routines. If you are not, this topic was covered in the Advanced Techniques column of the first issue of REALbasic Developer.
Those with knowledge of the Core Foundation may already be aware of Kevin Ballard's CFPlugin (http://www.tildesoft.com/Plugins.html), which implements many of the Core Foundation classes. I would be irresponsible not to bring this plugin to your attention, as it makes much of the work I'll be talking about in this article unnecessary. I use this plugin in my own applications and highly recommend it. However, I know that many people prefer to avoid plugins whenever possible; these people can rest assured that the Core Foundation is still within reach!
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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