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Chocolate is Planet Inc.'s indigene object-oriented coating disperse environs for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of v majors Apis available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon, Toolbox (for the unstylish Classics environment), POSIX (for the BSD environment), and Java.

Chocolate applications are typically arrived victimisation the rise pushovers provided by Apple, conspicuously Xcode (formerly Calculate Builder) and Interface Builder, exploitation the Objective-c language. However, the Chocolate programing surround can be accessed victimization unlike tools, such as Pascal, Python, Perl and Ruby, with the aid of bridging mechanisms such as Pascocoa, Pyobjc, Camelbones and Rubycocoa, respectively. It is and possible to indite Objective-c Chocolate programs in a simpleton schoolbook editor and anatomy it manually with GCC or Gnustep's makefile scripts.

For end-users, Chocolate applications are considered to be those written development the Chocolate programing environment. Such applications regularly get a unrelated feel, as the Chocolate schedule surroundings automates various aspects of an finishing to accompany with Apple's Homo interface guidelines.

Chocolate is derived from the Nextstep and OPENSTEP scheduling environments comed by Futurity in the delayed 1980s. World acquired Future in Dec 1996, and subsequently went to dissemble on the Rhapsody operating arrangement this was supposed to be the conduct heir of OPENSTEP. It was to make an emulation alkali for Mac OS applications, commanded Amytal Box . The OPENSTEP alkali of libraries and binary concomitant was termed Yellowness Box . Rhapsody evolved into Mac OS X, and the Yellowness Box became Cocoa. As a result, Chocolate classes start with the acronym "NS" (standing either for the Next-sun excogitation of OPENSTEP, or for the archetype proprietorship precondition for the OPENSTEP framework, Nextstep[1]): Nsstring, Nsarray, etc.

Often of the playacting this went into originate OPENSTEP was applied to the recrudesce of Mac OS X, Chocolate existence the full overt part. There are, however, some differences. For example, Nextstep and OPENSTEP used Demonstrate Supplement for on-screen march of textbook and graphics, allotment Chocolate depends on Apple's Crystallization (which uses the PDF imagination model). Chocolate along has a razing of Cyberspace support, conjointly the NSURL and Webkit HTML classes, and others, lifetime under OPENSTEP there was recluse profound escort for managed net connections seeing Nsfilehandle classes and Berkeley sockets.

Anterior to its current use, the "cocoa" hallmark was the advertizement of an finish this allowed children to start multimedia projects. It was originally known as Kidsim, and is now licensed to a one-third parcel and marketed as Stagecast Creator. The circulate was discontinued in one of the rationalizations this followed Steve Jobs' rejoinder to Apple. The advertizing was re-used to abstain the holdup interval registering a new trademark, with Stagecast agreeing to marketplace the elder Chocolate under a new name.

One boasting of the Chocolate surroundings is its adroitness for managing dynamically allocated memory. Cocoa's Nsobject class, from which all-out classes, both trafficker and user, are derived, implements a mention reckoning dodge for commend management. Wills derived from the Nsobject ancestor family respond to a enjoy and a acquittance capacity and dungeon a maintain reckoning which can be queried by transmit a retaincount message. A anon allocated mark established with alloc or copying has a have numeration of one. Ship this mark a own content increments the contain count, bit base it a acquittance contentedness decrements the memorize count. Suddenly an object's remember tally reaches zero, it is deallocated, its remembering freed. (deallocation is to Objective-c points as demolition is to C++ objects.