Is Cocoa equivalent to Win32 Mac or MFC on Windows?

Question

Is there a lower API level below Cocoa as a Win32 API below MFC? If so, is it widely used in Mac OS X or iOS Application develepment?

Answer 1

CoreFoundation is a lower-level C API:

http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/

Foundation classes are the highest set of objective-c classes:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/ObjC_classic/_index.html

Apple offers a “free” connection between these types:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFDesignConcepts/Articles/tollFreeBridgedTypes.html

For OSX, AppKit (Cocoa) is a top-level UI that uses foundation classes:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/ObjC_classic/_index.html

For devices (iOS) to the UIKit foundation classes (Cocoa Touch):

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIKit_Framework/_index.html

All of them are widely used in the development of OSX and iOS ...