Question

I come from the Java world, so to me it’s all object.foo(), but in Objective C, is object messaging the only way to invoke a method?

[object foo];

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to mind is using @property and dot-notation. A class with @property named ‘foo’ allows you to do like this:

anInstance.foo = @"bar";

which literally translates at compile-time to

[anInstance setFoo:@"bar"];

(similar with “getters”)

The other ways are more advanced, such as using NSObject’s performSelector: method, or other systems such as NSInvocation, etc. Going deeper, there are ways to call methods in the runtime, with c functions (all of this syntax eventually boils down to calling c-functions anyway); but I’m sure that’s not what you are after.