Slashdot Mirror
GNUstep On LinuxFocus
Dennis Leeuw writes "Linux focus has a very good article on GNUstep and it's status. It might have been a long time in the making, but they seem to pull it off." GNUstep doesn't get the attention that some of the window managers' get, but I think the diversity of the desktop interface is one of the more fun aspects of open source.
It's the building blocks for windowmaker, but
it's not a window manager itself.
Actually Wnidow Maker doesn't use any GNUStep libraries that I'm aware of. And Window Maker is moving futher away from the original GNUStep/NeXT interface. Not that that's a totally bad thing. Most of the enhancements have been pretty good.
GNUstep is not a window manager! It is a development environment and gui toolkit designed to be compatible with the OpenStep spec. If you actually read the article before approving it, you would realize this. Once again, confusing WindowMaker (which btw isn't even written using GNUstep) with GNUstep. It would have taken 45 seconds to read the article and figure this out...
(It ain't a window manager)
/ co coa.html
GnuStep is nothing more, nothing less than a fully object-oriented API under the GPL. It is a clone of OpenStep, NeXT's famous OO API that lives on as "Cocoa" in Apple OS X (to be officially released Saturday)
GnuStep (as OPENSTEP) uses Objective-C as a primary language. Objective-C is a fully Dynamic OO language that is a superset of ANSI C. It is modeled after Small Talk, but runs natively compiled- No bytecode.
Apple has added Java bindings to all the Cocoa/Gnustep APIs, so that developers can use Java as a language to call GunStep/OPENSTEP/Cocoa libs. GnuStep has also cloned this Java bridge, allowing the same functionailty in GnuStep.
GnuStep also includes a clone of NeXT's PostScript-based display layer, Display Postscript.
GnuStep also includes GnuStep Web, a GPL clone of NeXT/Apple's Web-Objects application server, which is used on a number of extremely high-profile web sites (including Dell's web store before Microsoft paid them to move to a M$ solution).
NeXT also had a set of development tools, the most interesting of which was Interface Builder, which builds dynamic GUIs (without any code generation). GnuStep has GPL clones of these in the works. They are part of the package, I believe.
These libs and tools were used by Tim Berners Lee to create the original web browser. They were also used to create the original version of Macromedia FreeHand. Anything that comes out for Apple's MacOS X that is labeled "Cocoa-based" uses these libs (http://www.omnigroup.com, http://www.caffeinesoft.com, and http://www.stone.com have some products you might be interested in)
The best source of developer documentation is Apple:
http://devworld.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa
GNUStep is a re-implementation of what is probably the most productive set of software development tools I've ever seen.
NeXTSTEP was revelation to me. When I went from the Mac to NeXT machines in 1989, I knew the mac *cold.* Within a month, I was a productive on NeXT as I had ever been on the Mac. Within three months, I could do anything on NeXT in about 1/3 of the time that it would take me on a mac.
There's an amazing culture shock you get when you step up to this kind of tool set. The amount of code you don't have to write will make you wonder why you ever put up with X windows, the Mac ToolBox, or (god forbid) the win32 API.
The downside to using NeXTSTEP, was always the vendor. They were notoriously difficult to do business with, and every NeXT customer I know always said that they would *love* to be able to keep this technology, while dropping the vendor.
GNUStep lets us drop the vendor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Absolutely - and being a founder of Slashdot, it seems to me you're in a better than usual position to do something about it.
/.'s coverage of the Unix desktop has essentially dwindled to KDE vs. Gnome with occasional news about highly vaporous 3-D environments. WindowMaker is probably more popular than Evolution and a lot of the other stuff that gets hyped around here. E used to get covered in embarassingly obsessive detail about Rasterman's life but since parting company with Miguel and Gnome, it's become the David Lee Roth of Linux. Blackbox, icewm, UDE, some cool new thing I haven't heard of -- that would be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters" to me.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Maybe it's me, but this article seemed very confused to me. The guy is basically mixing up Window Maker (a window manager for X11) and OpenStep. The distinction between the original NeXT System, Open Step, GNU Step and Mac OS X is not very clear either. He talks a little bit about Interface Builder, but not a word on the different technologies that power the thing.
This is really a shame, because a good explanation about the NeXT technologies would be the most welcome on slashdot. It would be intersting to compare features of the GNUStep/NeXT/OS X Framework against GNU frameworks like Gnome or KDE. This would make it possible to compare them, but also to see if they could be integrated.
Of course this would imply a real discussion, not the usual arguments like Gnome is going to rule the world and everything else is obsolete etc...