Objective-C Protocol and Delegates- raywenderlich.com

Even though we have ARC, understanding memory management is critical to writing effectives. This video covers the process.

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About Protocols:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/WorkingwithProtocols/WorkingwithProtocols.html

In the real world, people on official business are often required to follow strict procedures when dealing with certain situations. Law enforcement officials, for example, are required to “follow protocol” when making enquiries or collecting evidence.

In the world of object-oriented programming, it’s important to be able to define a set of behavior that is expected of an object in a given situation. As an example, a table view expects to be able to communicate with a data source object in order to find out what it is required to display. This means that the data source must respond to a specific set of messages that the table view might send.

The data source could be an instance of any class, such as a view controller (a subclass of NSViewController on OS X or UIViewController on iOS) or a dedicated data source class that perhaps just inherits from NSObject. In order for the table view to know whether an object is suitable as a data source, it’s important to be able to declare that the object implements the necessary methods.

Objective-C allows you to define protocols, which declare the methods expected to be used for a particular situation. This chapter describes the syntax to define a formal protocol, and explains how to mark a class interface as conforming to a protocol, which means that the class must implement the required methods.

A class interface declares the methods and properties associated with that class. A protocol, by contrast, is used to declare methods and properties that are independent of any specific class.

Protocols can include declarations for both instance methods and class methods, as well as properties.

To make the view as reusable as possible, all decisions about the information should be left to another object, a data source. This means that multiple instances of the same view class could display different information just by communicating with different sources.

Protocols Can Have Optional Methods

By default, all methods declared in a protocol are required methods. This means that any class that conforms to the protocol must implement those methods.

It’s also possible to specify optional methods in a protocol. These are methods that a class can implement only if it needs to.

As an example, you might decide that the titles on the pie chart should be optional. If the data source object doesn’t implement the titleForSegmentAtIndex:, no titles should be shown in the view.

Check that Optional Methods Are Implemented at Runtime

If a method in a protocol is marked as optional, you must check whether an object implements that method before attempting to call it.

Protocols Inherit from Other Protocols

In the same way that an Objective-C class can inherit from a superclass, you can also specify that one protocol conforms to another.

As an example, it’s best practice to define your protocols to conform to the NSObject protocol (some of the NSObject behavior is split from its class interface into a separate protocol; the NSObject class adopts the NSObject protocol).

By indicating that your own protocol conforms to the NSObject protocol, you’re indicating that any object that adopts the custom protocol will also provide implementations for each of the NSObject protocol methods. Because you’re presumably using some subclass of NSObject, you don’t need to worry about providing your own implementations for these NSObject methods. The protocol adoption is useful, however, for situations like that described above.

About Objective C (from Wikipedia)

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It was the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS operating systems, and their respective application programming interfaces (APIs) Cocoa and Cocoa Touch prior to the introduction of Swift.

The programming language Objective-C was originally developed in the early 1980s. It was selected as the main language used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system, from which OS X and iOS are derived.[3] a