Cocoa

Also short for hot cocoa.

Based on NeXTStep, Cocoa is an elegant set of object-oriented APIs and runtime libraries and frameworks that is very quick and easy to develop for. You can see its ancestry in the names of the objects which all begin with NS, for NeXTStep.
Apps may be written in Objective-C or Java, and can take advantage of a large number of objects in the low level Core Foundation and high level AppKit frameworks. These provide opaque objects such as NSStrings which hold localizable Unicode strings and NSDictionarys which hold key-value pairs. There is built-in functionality for everything from PDF rendering to spellchecking and HTTP handling. Inter-process communication is very easy, and with distributed objects, applications may transparently load objects from other apps: yes, you can use any Cocoa app as a runtime library.

Creating GUIs for Cocoa apps is laughably easy. They are made using Apple's free Interface Builder tool. This allows developers to create their interface by dragging and dropping widgets and other Aqua interface elements such as tabbed panes, sheets and drawers, which are then stored as XML nib files. All the boring GUI stuff like tracking click events is handled transparently. This means that there is no code used in the creation of a Cocoa app's GUI. You can actually open and edit the nib files of an application and completely redesign the interface, without recompiling. This, combined with the publicly accessible interfaces to Cocoa objects means that you could almost say that all Cocoa apps are open source.

Ok, a slight exaggeration, but you can easily customise or borrow functionality from commercial apps.

The GNUStep project aims produce a Cocoa-compatible Objective-C environment for other OSs.

Also rhyming slang for "think", from "cocoa drink". Almost invariably used ironically in the expression "I should cocoa", i.e. with the sense "I doubt that very much!"

ALF: What'll you do with the money, mate?
BERT: Reckon I'll give it all to charity.
ALF: Ho, yus, I should cocoa.

Co"coa (?), n., Co"coa palm` (?) [Sp. & Pg. coco cocoanut, in Sp. also, cocoa palm. The Portuguese name is said to have been given from the monkeylike face at the base of the nut, fr. Pg. coco a bugbear, an ugly mask to frighten children. Cf., however, Gr. the cocoa palm and its fruit, , , a kind of Egyptian palm.] Bot.

A palm tree producing the cocoanut (Cocos nucifera). It grows in nearly all tropical countries, attaining a height of sixty or eighty feet. The trunk is without branches, and has a tuft of leaves at the top, each being fifteen or twenty feet in length, and at the base of these the nuts hang in clusters; the cocoanut tree.

© Webster 1913.

Co"coa, n. [Corrupted fr. cacao.]

A preparation made from the seeds of the chocolate tree, and used in making, a beverage; also the beverage made from cocoa or cocoa shells.

Cocoa shells, the husks which separate from the cacao seeds in preparing them for use.

© Webster 1913.