Does Apple have a Grand Cocoa Strategy?

Well this week I’m a bit under the weather, but definitely getting better and still managing to get some coding done so I thought I’d indulge you with this bit of commentary that's been on my mind for a while. Before I do so I want you to know that Im working on a small something that mostly beginner Cocoa programmers may find very useful, though veterans may find it useful as well. I was amazed as I searched in Google to see if someone had already done this project and I couldn’t find one result that matched this. Then I searched Yahoo! just to make sure... nothing. Anyway I’ll reveal this once it’s done so keep tuned. The Cocoa Strategy One thing Im surprised i’ve never heard anybody discuss, or at least never seen it discussed anywhere (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) is the strategy Apple has for the Cocoa (and related) Frameworks. For me learning Cocoa on Mac OS X 10.0.4 (on my first Mac a 733Mhz Quicksilver PowerMac G4) through 10.2 you got mostly a sense of... well this could be a great kit, it definitely has potential, but mostly you got the feeling that things were being fixed and brought up to standards. It wasn’t till Panther ( Mac OS X 10.3) that I saw something in the SDK that made me really say wow (after everything you already saw wow at when being introduced to Cocoa.) That was Cocoa Bindings, it was like Apple saying “hey you remember writting all that code just to display data in a NSTableView? Forget it! Just bind it!” At the time I was hugely impressed by this because this was a totally different style of programming. I had never conceived of not programmatically setting the data in a table. At first it feels like setting up some sort of intricate laser setup using precision angles with mirrors and saying “just trust me if you set this up like so it’ll connect.” So now we have Cocoa Bindings. “Great!” you say. Then 10.4 Tiger came out and so did Core Data. More than this Core Data felt like a perfect extension of Cocoa Bindings. In bindings you got a huge reduction in code by letting Apple manage all this for you on the back end and all you had to do was make your Instance Classes Key-Value Coding/Observing ( KVC/KVO ) Compliant which was (and still really is unless you’ve become really lazy after Core Data) nothing hard to do at all. In Core Data you got data persistence, database-like querying and the ability to save data in 3 different formats with barely any effort. When Tiger came out I thought to myself “Wow is this a grand strategy Apple has? Or are they just following up on the next logical step to make Cocoa better?” Looking at this you could easily make arguments one way or another. Wikipedia makes a comparsion of Core Data against an earlier NeXT Product called Enterprise Objects Framework. Now I’ve never used EOF, nor have I used WebObjects (which you use with EOF), but it does seem from the description that EOF and Core Data are definitely different in design, though somewhat similar in some of their functionality. Could you say that Apple had a goal of one day of brining the functionality that now is Core Data to the Cocoa Framework? Maybe. This technology has obviously stuck around for years and years so Apple, or at least some part of Apple, has believed in it. However even if you think they really wanted this, surely there must be a grand strategy for Cocoa? If you think this, then Leopard surely must put it to the test. We’ve put in a system (Bindings) to make some tasks which required a decent amount of code easy, then we put in a system to add data persistence and some SQL-like queries amongst other things. So what could be the next logical step? Now because I went to WWDC 06 this gets slightly fuzzy in what I can and can’t tell you so I shall err on the side of caution when speaking of Leopard improvements. However I can say in this context that I didn’t see anything that spoke to me (strongly at least) that this is the next logical addtion to Core Data. There were some brand spanking new classes that were very impressive and used Cocoa Bindings (obviously.) The thing that spoke to me the most was the vastly improved Developer tools like Interface Builder (especially), Xcode and Xray. These new tools are practically like having a new framework which makes you vastly more productive. So im curious what everybody thinks. Do you think Apple has somewhat of a grand strategy in mind for Cocoa? Or do you think Apple is more short sighted in this respect of just performing a great analysis of the framework after each Mac OS X release and giving the developers what they are trying to reach for? More or less what do you think should be included in Cocoa for Mac OS X 10.6? One interesting trend I see repeating itself over and over is that of Apple coming up with some great custom control (usually used in iLife) and then Cocoa developers working on their own custom implementation of that control, then Apple releases it officially in the next SDK for Mac OS X. I wonder how long that will continue?