NobleCocoa

A riff on ReactiveCocoa that explores what's possible using plain Cocoa.

What's with the name?

1. The last column in the periodic table is made up of 6 elements that are known as the noble gases due to their low reactivity. This seemed like a good contrast to ReactiveCocoa.
2. Noble seems like a good adjective to describe Cocoa, which is an excellent development platform.

What's it all about?

ReactiveCocoa combines a number of elements in a single framework:

1. A implementation of bindings (which are absent on iOS)
2. A layer on top of KVO
3. A method for reducing state in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch apps

(That's not an exhaustive list. But this isn't the place for such a list.)

As I learned about ReactiveCocoa and some of the ideas that it's based on, I thought about how to minimize state in a Cocoa application without RAC. I realized that the basics could by achieved through KVO's dependent keys.

This is an example application, loosely based on joshaber's RACSignupDemo. It uses KVO and bindings to perform some of the same work while minimizing state.

Why do this?

1. To explore the limits of Cocoa
2. To explore what ReactiveCocoa provides and how it's different than standard Cocoa.
3. To explore how to minimize state in apps that don't use ReactiveCocoa.