macOS Understanding plists...

[netytan]

I'm pretty new to Cocoa; I have been reading though the developers documentation for quite a while. I just can't seem to figure out the whole plist thing, so I have a few simple questions ...

1. What exactly is a plist?
2. What kind of things are they used for?
3. Whats the difference between the plists written in curly braces and the plists written in XML format?
4. If there isn't a real difference then can the plists be interchanged i.e. could i change a curly brace style plist to an XML style plist?

Thanks much guys,

Mark.

 

[robbieduncan]

I'm pretty new to Cocoa; I have been reading though the developers documentation for quite a while. I just can't seem to figure out the whole plist thing, so I have a few simple questions ...

1. What exactly is a plist?

It's a property list. Basically a way of serialising object data to disk.

2. What kind of things are they used for?

See above

3. Whats the difference between the plists written in curly braces and the plists written in XML format?

Curly brace ones are legacy (from NeXT days I think). The current tool set will load them, but nothing recent should be writing them. The XML type support more data types as well.

4. If there isn't a real difference then can the plists be interchanged i.e. could i change a curly brace style plist to an XML style plist?

Thanks much guys,
Mark.

Sure if you want to.

 

[netytan]

Xcode is still using the legacy style plists for example, so it got me wondering if I could recreate these as XML plists without it causing any problems to the program?

Anyway, thank you for the reply! Clears up some of my thinking

Mark.

 

[robbieduncan]

Slightly strange! It is probably because XCode is still Project Builder (which was carried over from the NeXT days) underneath.

 

[netytan]

Yeah, hopefully Apple has fixed all this for Xcode 2.0 . Along with the weird extension system & file naming!