• Powerpost Equivalent For Mac

I'm new to the world of Mac programming. Can someone please tell me what the equivalent of reusable COM components are in Mac and some links to a good resource to get started (in creating reusable COM-like components and referring those components from a calling app)?

Clarification: - I wish to know if there exist a similar technology, which is supported at OS level. I asked the question because I want to port some of my apps (which make use of existing type libraries from Windows as well as those that I make) to Mac. Portable optical drive for mac. Is it possible that I create wrapper classes for my existing (Window) type libraries and refer to them from a Mac app? Cocoa/Objective-C objects are pretty much all you need.

Powerpost Equivalent For Mac

At a higher level, NIBs can be reusable between applications, although I don't think that is widely done. You can write plug-ins for Interface Builder to use your own components like the standard ones. Apple Events and AppleScript are the standard IPC and scripting technologies. However, unlike COM in the Windows world, there are really no standard conventions for components that interact with one another via standard interfaces, live in standard containers, participate in transactions, etc. There is no analogue to a type library or IDL (although a scripting dictionary may come close).

Chuck, while I don't disagree that AppleEvents and PDO exist they're not an exact replacement for COM IPC. You could implement an interface enumeration system on PDO, but it doesn't really provide anything out of the box. And there isn't anything (to the best of my knowledge) that provides an equivalent to a COM Container. Lots of Cocoa apps provide an interface for loadable bundles, but again, there's no enumeration of capabilities (unless the app developer specifies one), and so you can't do tricks like embedding a generic component into multiple apps. – Oct 27 '09 at 23:55.