Adam Fedor of GNUstep Says Stuff

JgiSaw writes "GNUstep provides an Object-Oriented application development framework and tool set for use on a wide variety of computer platforms. It is based on the original OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc. (now owned by Apple and endorced into MacOSX). OSNews is hosting an interview with Adam Fedor, of the GNUstep project, where Adam mentions among others that GnuStep has support for the MacOSX API too, which will make porting MacOSX applications to Linux much easier."

Stuff?

[mrmag00]

He said Stuff? Thats absolutely great! There are so few interviews on 'stuff' out there, we definately need more quality work such as this.

Oh well, I'm sure they are tierd after yesterday.

macos x api

[geomcbay]

Its kind of cool that it supports the OS X API, but how useful is that in practice? There's hardly any apps that use the OS X APIs right now, and of the ones that exist the developers haven't really shown much interest in supporting Linux...

You should think the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

That your GNUStep applications can easily be ported to MacOS X.

GNUStep

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used GNUStep recently, but I can tell you that, unlike KDE or GNOME, GNUStep has the capability to bring real applications to linux land.

There are a lot of NeXT developers who would love to port their applications. It would have been a real coupe if GNUStep was ready for prime time before OS X, but, oh well.

My only concern over it was that it used that dog display ghostscript. If you use Solaris, the Sun XWindow server has builtin support for display postscript. It's too bad the Open Source community has a "{XWindows|Display Ghostscript | | etc} sucks, but it's good enough, so why try to build a replacement" mentality. Fortunately, there are people like Adam who say "Fuck that, I don;t want to wallow in mediocracy".

Long live GNUStep!!

the genius of the NeXT api

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing was done real well. Principle of least astonishment. You were never surprised (or angered) by the way a method call behaved. Everything acted exactly how you would expect it.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The OPENSTEP API (which the OS X API is derived from) was ported to Unix, Windows NT, and OPENSTEP for Mach (NeXT's OS). This is not vaporware either.
GNUstep is being written for Unix and NT at this time, and MacOS X is available on Macintoshes. This is nearly the cross-platform support of Qt, lacking only in the embedded market (for which you would need to be a fool to use your app unchanged anyway).
OPENSTEP is legendary for the speed and ease of development of programs created using it. Qt is famous for resembling MFC. And besides, ObjC is a more elegant language anyway!

Re:Question

[droleary]

Why would I want to develop crossplatform applications with GNUStep, when I can use Qt 3.0 [trolltech.com]?

Why use anything? If you're ga-ga for Qt, use it. If you actually want to learn about alternatives, look into GNUstep. The OpenStep API happens to have over a decade of refinements in it and is based on an outstanding OO language.

All this using the proven C++ language.

Heh. "Proven to suck" comes to mind. In reality, C++ is a very poor OO language; ObjC just blows it away. You can take a day out of your schedule ot learn the basic syntax additions to C and if you've got an ounce of OO skill you will immediately see the huge advantage to things like categories.

This is not vaporware folks. Each supported platform is just that: fully supported and stable.

Yet the page you link to has "Beta" all over it, and suggests you "Evaluate" the Mac version. Depending on your needs GNUstep might not be ready just yet, but don't go pretending that your pet toolkit is something it's not. I have SDL-based apps running on my OS X box, but where are the Qt-based apps I should be expecting from this "fully supported and stable" toolkit?

Besides the obvious cost of using Qt for commercial development (which should only be a financial issue for individual developers, not companies), what good reason is there to use anything else?

Your argument is flawed in that it could apply to anything. If you're comfortable with Qt and uncomfortable actually trying anything new, just use Qt. Let me know when I can run your applications on my platform. I had OpenStep-based apps running on Linux in 1996, and GNUstep has only gotten better since then.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Forget porting, how good is the API?

[TheAwfulTruth]

Unbiased? Have you even used MFC? MFC is an amazingly thin wrapper around the Win32. In fact TOO thin. Rather than being a completely clean genericly useful set of classes there are conspicuous holes in the functionality of several widgets because they do nothing but wrap the lower level windows GUI functions.