Re: [NTLK] Simon's NCK updates?

On 1/26/07, Niklas Nisbeth <noisetonepause@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/26/07, Simon Bell <simonbell@mac.com> wrote:
> >
> > > o the app itself uses the Cocoa AppKit to do its UI. I don't think
> > > you could salvage much of the UI code (would GNUStep or similar do
> > > much in this area?), but code for the thread that handles the
> > > connection should be reusable.
> >
> > If it uses Cocoa and ObjC, frankly you should give a try to GNUstep.
> >
>
> GNUStep doesn't have anything of CoreFoundation or CoreData (and a few
> other things), only the original NeXTStep/OPENSTEP stuff and not even
> all of that. I don't think it reads the Apple binary .nibs either.

If you use Cocoa, you should not use CoreFoundation :-) -- you should
use Foundation. And GNUstep of course provides Foundation.

There's a CoreData implementation for GNUstep:
http://gscoredata.nongnu.org/DataBuilder/Screenshots/index.html

And GNUstep can read Apple xml nibs now. So you just need to take your
binary nibs, open them in InterfaceBuilder on OSX, save them with the
new format, and that's it.

> I haven't done more than a few test apps in Cocoa or GNUstep (I was
> briefly very, very fascinated with GS, but it has a few problems,
> mostly caused by their insistence on playing nice with FreeDesktop
> standards etc), but from what I've picked up, GNUstep apps will mostly
> be source compatible with Cocoa, but the other way around is more rare.

that's true. Simply because GNUstep provide Foundation and AppKit --
so if you are using other frameworks you could have run into some
troubles :)
And NSController isn't implemented yet, so if you use it you'll need
to redo the controllers.

But even like that it's not that big of a job to make a *cocoa*
application compile on GNUstep. The most annoying thing was to redo
the UI in Gorm (even if it's as easy to do as in IB, you'd still need
to do it :) and now that GNUstep can directly load IB nibs...

> Also, whilst GNUstep is crossplatform, it's not some a lot of people
> have installed, certainly not Windows users - and it's not as easy to
> install as it should be... and I think it needs Cygwin too, which by
> all accounts is a bit of a hassle.

You can download ready to use installers for windows on the gnustep ftp.
It doesn't need Cygwin. The gui backend on windows even use the
windows GDI.. but it's not perfect, even if improving. Now I admit
that if you want to distribute an application on windows it's not as
easy as it could be (you'd need to bundle gnustep dll with the app).

But certainly if you want to port an application from Cocoa to Linux,
GNUstep should be evaluated...

-- 
Nicolas Roard
"La perfection, ce n'est pas quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, c'est
quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -- Antoine de St-Exupéry
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