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 you save a nib file, Interface Builder is archiving objects into a file. (Instead of archiving, a Java programmer would call this process serialization.)

Figure 10.1. Archiving

[View full size image]