AGL, or
???Apple OpenGL??? is the Carbon windowing interface to OpenGL. Like CGL and
Cocoa, the AGL interface provides a set of routines for managing pixel formats,
OpenGL contexts, and drawables (a.k.a surfaces).
As far as Apple technologies are concerned, AGL is overshadowed by the more
modern and objecti?¬?ed Cocoa. Still, AGL has its place in today??™s applications
and is still a ?¬?rst-class citizen when it comes to Apple??™s ongoing support of
the API.
Despite AGL being ???the old way??? to do things from the perspective of hardcore
Apple technology buffs, it has its advantages. Because Cocoa is de?¬?ned as
an Objective-C class hierarchy, there are some obvious reasons why adapting
an existing application not written in Objective-C would pose more challenges.
This is especially true if the existing application doesn??™t have a distinct software
abstraction de?¬?ning its view in the model-view-controller design pattern.
In other words, if the UI logic is not easily separated from the application logic,
it??™s dif?¬?cult to replace the UI logic with code from a different object-based UI
library like that of Cocoa.
Another potential challenge of using Cocoa is its use of Objective-C.
Although Objective-C applications can be written as a conglomeration of C,
C++, Objective-C, and even Java, moving between the syntax and semantics of
different programming languages always imposes some overhead to the software
development process.
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