Cocoa is an application environment for both the Mac OS X operating system and iPhone OS, the operating system used on multi-touch devices such as iPhone and iPod touch. It consists of a suite of object-oriented software libraries, a runtime, and an integrated development environment.
This content expands on this definition, describing the purpose, capabilities, and components of Cocoa on both platforms. Reading this functional description of Cocoa is an essential first step toward understanding Cocoa as a developer.
Cocoa is a set of object-oriented frameworks that provides a runtime environment for applications running on Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It is also part of a development environment that helps you efficiently bring these applications from design stage to deployment. Cocoa is the preeminent application environment for Mac OS X and the only application environment for iPhone OS. (Carbon is an alternative environment on Mac OS X, but it is a compatibility framework with procedural programmatic interface intended to support existing Mac OS X code bases.) Most of the applications you see on Mac OS X and iPhone OS, including Mail and Safari, are Cocoa applications. An integrated development environment called Xcode supports application development for both platforms. The combination of this development environment and Cocoa makes it easy to create a well-factored, full-featured application.
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