Cocoa Touch (iOS) vs. Cocoa (OS X) vs. Atmosphere

The Cocoa Touch layer contains key frameworks for building iOS apps. These frameworks define the appearance of your app. They also provide the basic app infrastructure and support for key technologies such as multitasking, touch-based input, push notifications, and many high-level system services.

Much of Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C, an object-oriented language that is compiled to run at incredible speed, yet employs a truly dynamic runtime making it uniquely flexible. Because Objective-C is a superset of C, it is easy to mix C and even C++ into your Cocoa applications.

The Atmosphere Framework contains client and server side components for building Asynchronous Web Applications. The majority of popular frameworks are either supporting Atmosphere or supported natively by the framework. The Atmosphere Framework supports all major Browsers and Servers.