To understand what the NotificationCenter is, we first need to understand Notifications:
Notifications are messages that certain events happened or are about to happen.
For example, a window sends out a notification to the NotificationCenter before it closes. Other objects can register themselves as observers of this notification with the NotificationCenter. To do that, they’ll have to tell the NotificationCenter that they want to get the notification when the window object sends it out and they also should implement a method dealing with that notification when it comes.
This could be used, for example, for objects deallocating themselves when a window closes or any other actions that should be performed when something happens to another object. (One can also implement own notifications.)
A Notification’s function is similar to that of a DelegateObject - the main difference is that only one object can be the delegate for another object whereas many objects can react to a single object’s notification.
More on this subject can be found here: http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Technical/2000-03-03.01.html
Check out “Vermont Recipes” from CocoaTutorials for an excellent example app that includes (among many other things) sample code for dealing with notifications.
Notifications & Notification Centers implement the “Observer” design pattern.
If you are familiar with PowerPlant, a Notification Center is like an LBroadcaster, except you use an instance of it rather than subclassing it. (There is no LListener – any class can observe a notification center).
Notifications themselves don’t really have a parallel in PowerPlant, except maybe if you imagine that the Message/Param pair passed around by LBroadcasters was replaced by an object.
I added some example code to NotificationSampleCode
TomWaters
*For notifications within the same thread use NSNotificationCenter *For notifications between different threads use DistributedObjects or a third-party class such as InterThreadMessaging *For notifications between different processes use NSDistributedNotificationCenter - i.e. different apps
a metaphor for a NotificationCenter is a Mailing List Server