Chapter 3. Project Builder Projects

Project Builder is an application that manages software development projects. It's Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for Mac OS X, which provides a project browser, a full-featured code editor, language-savvy symbol recognition, advanced project-searching capabilities, documentation access, build and debugging support, and other features that can streamline the development process. With it, you can create such Mac OS X software projects as:

• An application, which is a bundle that contains all the resources necessary to launch the application, including the application's executable files. A bundle is a folder packaged to look like a single file.

• Frameworks, which are bundles that contain a dynamic shared library and all the resources that go with that library, such as header files, images, and documentation.

• Kernel extensions, which are bundles the operating system loads into the kernel environment.

• Libraries, which are code and resources that can't execute on their own, but that export functions and global variables for others to use; usually linked to an application when the application runs instead of when it's compiled.

• Plug-ins, which are bundles that contain executable code and associated resources that must be loaded into a running application.