I have attempted to find a way to create a zip archive (or GZip archive) in Objective-C, but my knowledge of the language is still lacking.
I see a way to compress an existing data structure in this question, but it does not seem to answer the question of how to make an archive.
To be explicitly clear: by archive I mean the equivalent of a zip file or GZip file that contains many different files internally, and are archived and then compressed for transfer or usage as a single entity.
I ended up using a zip command from a command line instead of doing the tar archive.