10 Years of OpenStep

tarzeau writes "Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making 'write once, compile everywhere' a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers. The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's Mac OS X 'Cocoa' release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely. Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works."

Comments

Next

[2.7182]

I was a really big Next user, and for me OS X seems to be the natural extension of it. But it was amazing to be using Next machines in the early 90's. They were remarkably ahead of their time.

OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome

[Florian]

It's a pity that, at the peak of the Linux desktop hype in the late 1990s, when evangelists predicted the near death of Microsoft, KDE and Gnome were rushed out of the door, and GNUstep development remained obscure. It was the first time that distributed free software development defected from its proven practice of implementing standardized, proven APIs and technology (like POSIX) and created major APIs of its own. The result is that KDE and Gnome have created APIs that nobody uses for serious large-scale software development projects [except those companies who have large investments into KDE/Gnome themselves, like Ximian with Evolution]. Now KDE and Gnome have a long way to go to clean up and standardize their APIs (via freedesktop.org), usability (via UI guidelines) and code, solving issues that adherence to an existing open GUI specification like OpenStep would have prevented in the first place.

Imagine the massive development efforts on KDE and Gnome, including the massive rewrites of their codebases, would instead had gone into GNUstep, so that the GNU/Linux and *BSD desktop would be OS X/Cocao source compatibile today [and companies developing for OS X port their software to Linux basically with one more compiler run]...

Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome

[muecksteiner]

The main trouble - then and now - is that the majority of folks simply "don't get it" why OpenStep is superior to crippleware APIs like Qt/KDE.

KDE is "trying to do an improved Windows on Linux" (and taking a lot of its bad design choices with them in the process), while OpenStep is something entirely different. And for an average, M$-infected programmer using something like that would require some re-thinking of some of one's own assumptions how apps should be coded, so most simply don't bother. Sheep, that's what I call them... ;-)

I guess the apathy towards OpenStep also stems from the fact that most people have never seen NeXTStep development in action - it left most witnesses drooling for more - and/or because they're too conventionally-minded to try anything outside their mainstream C++/Java box. To paraphrase a famous quote, "nobody was ever fired for choosing C++", right? And who's ever heard of Objective C - apart from geeks, that is?.

If you're particularly uncharitable you could argue that the selection process which gave us Linux itself followed a similar pattern. There were technologically more advanced and initially cleaner OS projects out there at the time, but somehow the crowd choose a less-than-cutting-edge project they could at least *understand*.

I used NeXTStep for years, and I'm still doing my software development in ObjC - luckily I work in a niche where this is possible. If all others want to make their life difficult - well, that's their choice... ;-)

Just my two euro cents

A.W.

Re:Qt acheived this already

[OmniVector]

any program worth his shit should have no trouble picking up objective-c (a far simpler and more powerful language than c++). the language barrier really isn't an issue. it's more an issue of mindshare. there are a lot of things that are better in the computing world by design but get largely ignored due to lack of marketing.