Cocoa is Apple Inc.'s native object-oriented application program environment for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of four major APIs available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon, POSIX (for the BSD environment), and Java.
Cocoa applications are typically developed using the development tools provided by Apple, specifically Xcode (formerly Project Builder) and Interface Builder, using the Objective-C language. However, the Cocoa programming environment can be accessed using other tools, such as Pascal, Python, Perl and Ruby, with the aid of bridging mechanisms such as PasCocoa, PyObjC, CamelBones and RubyCocoa, respectively. Also, under development by Apple, is an implementation of the Ruby Language, called MacRuby, which does away with the requirement for a bridging mechanism. It is also possible to write Objective-C Cocoa programs in a simple text editor and build it manually with GCC or GNUstep's makefile scripts.
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