Cocoa Technologies Back-Story?

FROM : Daniel Jalkut
DATE : Sat Apr 30 23:56:57 2005

I am troubled by the "it fell out of the sky" aspect of some newer 
Cocoa technologies. I don't come from a background of application 
design, so I may have a harder time grasping some of the concepts as 
they come up. It was hard enough to take in the MVC paradigm and 
other design recommendations that came with the earliest Cocoa APIs. 
But it was helpful to me to be able to hunt down non-Apple 
documentation that helped put these technologies into context.  For 
instance, I really liked the description of MVC in the Design 
Patterns book. It helped put things in perspective to know that this 
design philosophy came from Smalltalk and I could look to that 
resource for more perspectives on it.

Having finally digested MVC and getting closer to understanding 
bindings, I am now ready for Core Data to completely disrupt my 
concept of how apps ought to be designed. Here are some of my 
misgivings/hesitations about apple technology.  I have realized that 
what it comes down to are a bunch of unanswered questions that linger 
in my mind. I'm going to just spew some of these questions and 
hopefully someone will have a sense for good recommendations of books 
or avenues of research that will help me answer them. Some of these 
questions can probably just be answered right here, but I'm 
especially interested to get pointers to good reading materials that 
would also lead me to those answers.

Bindings:
Whose idea  was it try to eliminate the controller layer?
Is there a history to trying to do this outside of Apple/NeXT?
If so, do those approaches go by a different name?
Do other platforms that don't have the benefit of key/value runtime 
introspection have a different solution to this kind of thing, or do 
they all use some kind of "yucky controller layer" ?

Core Data:
Is this database technology?
Is it "normal" to apply database technology to application design?
Is there a debate about whether database "entity modeling" should be 
used in desktop applications?
Should I feel warm and fuzzy about designing my application's model 
this way instead of in a more "dictionary-oriented" way?
Are there times that I should favor "traditional" model design over 
this new format?
Is good database design equivalent to good application model design?

Kind of rambling, but hopefully this will provoke some interesting 
reading :)  I would especially be interested in any book on 
application design that specifically talks about these issues. 
Essentially, I'd like to read something that sets the stage for me to 
think to myself "Aha, this is clearly a solution to that age-old 
problem of application design."

Thanks,
Daniel