Chapter 10. Archiving

While an object-oriented program is running, a complex graph of objects is being created. It is often necessary to represent this graph of objects as a stream of bytes, a process called archiving (Figure 10.1). This stream of bytes can then be sent across a network connection or written into a file. For example, when creating a NIB from the XIB file you edited in the Interface Builder editor, the compiler is archiving objects into a file. (Instead of “archiving,” a Java programmer would call this process “serialization.”)

Figure 10.1. Archiving

When you need to recreate the graph of objects from the stream of bytes, you will unarchive it. When your application starts up, it unarchives the objects from the NIB file that was created by the compiler.