Organising your classes in a cocoa app

Question

This question could apply to all languages and frameworks but I'm looking for something a bit more 'cocoa specific'. I come from a Java background and I've noticed that learning objective-c is a lot more than just syntax, it's almost a completely different way of thinking.

What I've been having the most trouble with, must be the way one has to organise your classes. Sure all basic OOP(Object Oriented Programming) rules apply, and using MVC patterns where you can is recommended. But with me being used to Java I just need to set a few things straight and make sure I've got the right idea:

So for the sake of simplicity let just focus on one part of an app - Logging a user in. You'd have your .xib file for the UI (called Login.xib), you'd have your class that handles your data (connecting to a web service, called LoginModel.m) and you'd have your controller that acts as the middle man between your front-end and data (Called LoginController.m).

Is this is a pretty good example of applying MVC to a Cocoa app? And if it is, does that mean that you'd have 6 files created for this (since you have header files and implementation files). 6 files just to handle something simple as logging a user in. You can imagine how many you'd end up with for an entire app, even the most simplest of ones...

So my question is - Am I doing something wrong? Do I have the wrong idea? Or is the idea of too many files and too long method names just something I need to get used to since my brain is still working in 'Java Mode'?

Answer 1

Your ideas on how to handle that outlined above are fully correct. There is nothing bad about having a lot of files in the project. It does help a lot when you want to reuse code or if for example login details change and you don't want to edit multiple code locations.

Nevertheless, you may combine in such simple cases model class and controller class, especially if your model data can for example be stored in an NSDictionary and such. Only if you have complex model objects, that will run a lot of their own code, it will be better to separate them out.

Variable and method names can't be too long ;) always use a good name that especially describes the functionality or task. You usually don't have to type them often, but Xcode autocomplete will deal with that easily.