10 Years of OpenStep

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:40AM from the back-in-the-day dept.

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."

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Next by 2.7182 · 2004-10-19 01:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Next by Daengbo · 2004-10-19 03:01 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  OK, suppose I want an OpenStep desktop on a GNU/Linux system... What desktop should I use? GnuStep gives me no good answer!
  
  GNUstep is development environment, not a window manager Many people have confused GNUstep with WindowMaker. GNUstep, however, is not a window manager. WindowMaker is the most often-used NeXT-looking application on a non-NeXT system. WindowMaker also uses a derivation of the GNUstep logo. WindowMaker is the preferred GNUstep window manager, but GNUstep applications also work with any window manager, although you're most likely, currently, to have a more cohesive desktop experience if you use the two in conjunction.
  
  Relation to WindowMaker WindowMaker is a window manager, not a workspace manager nor a file browser. It is nothing more. WindowMaker and GNUstep share almost no libraries or functionality. WindowMaker is written in C, and GNUstep is written in Objective-C. WindowMaker does make certain things easier for GNUstep, but it is not GNUstep itself, although it is a part of the project.
  Well, then... GnuStep seems to recommend WM as the choice for Gnustep applications, but isn't itself Gnustep in any way.
  
  Is there anything that is? I would like to install and play for at least five minutes...
  
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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by CoolMoDee · 2004-10-19 01:46 · Score: 4, Informative

The first web browser was developed with NeXT and Openstep...

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Another French pioneer... by mirko · 2004-10-19 01:47 · Score: 4, Informative

Kudos to Jean-Marie Hullot, who contributed to this by designing "Interface Builder" !

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by Nexum · 2004-10-19 01:47 · Score: 5, Informative

What about the first web browser for a start?

The first wholescale industrial use of OOP practices?

etc. Do some googling.

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What's NeXT? by mrchapp · 2004-10-19 01:48 · Score: 4, Interesting

Looking back at my old NeXT (we never lose a chance to brag about having one) makes me wonder what's coming in the next 10 years, and how much of that will arrive from Steve Jobs' hand.
Re:Call me stupid, but.... by AKAImBatman · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Informative

The NeXTStep (a.k.a. OpenStep) API was developed as part of the NeXTOS that ran on NeXT workstations during the 90's. Several deals were made with other Unix vendors (including Sun) for them to support the "OpenStep" standard.

NeXT was bought off by Apple, and was developed into Mac OS X. The OS X Cocoa API is really nothing more than the NeXTStep API set, and is almost 100% source compatible with programs from the old NeXT machines.

More Information

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to understand this in context by minus_273 · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

consider that tin burns lee when developing the www and the original browser gave up on his old projects and got a next box becasue the development of the UI and software was so easy on it. I wonder what would have have happened hsd he not gotten it :).
On a side note, it is really quite sad the linux developers are not using/updating openstep. The fact that it is nearly completely compatible with OSX's Cocoa is a huge plus. I discovered this while developing software in Cocoa and have often thought about how cool it would be to have a GL based desktop with a slick Openstep ui ( the current one looks like it is stuck in 1993) on linux.. Then I got a Mac

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by mirko · 2004-10-19 01:49 · Score: 5, Informative

The game Doom was also developed on NeXT.

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There was never anything so consistent, stable.... by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 01:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

and productive out of the box as NeXTstep (says the guy who still uses a NeXT Cube as his main production machine at home).

- Command= in any app to get a definition in Webster.app rocks
- having all of your man pages, the sysadmin refs, and the works of Will Shakespeare and anything else you wish to add in Digital Librarian ensures one can look up what one needs at will.
- Being able to improve the functionality of _any_ app by installing a Service or an app which provides a Service provides a synergy one doesn't get in Mac OS X where it's hit-or-miss whether or no an app supports Services (Cocoa apps do, Carbon and Java apps have to be specially coded)
- having total control over the screen (you can drag off-screen and hide all but one pixel of the vertical menu, one tile of the Dock)
- The vertical menu makes tear-off sub-menus make sense, which allows effortless customization of one's working environment for a given task w/o inscrutable toolbars
- the pop-up menu means that the menu for the current app is always instantly available --- some commands can even become gestural in one's access to them, e.g., ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuso, right-button-menu click, down a bit and straight over and release

I could go on, and I have, check my rants on groups.google.com in comp.sys.next/mac.advocacy

I've got a little bit more on my site, http://members.aol.com/willadams look for my nascent gnustep pages, or the NeXT brochure in my portfolio

Or of course, visit http://www.gnustep.org or http://www.stepwise.com for some good programming info

William

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Re:Call me stupid, but.... by WillAdams · 2004-10-19 01:56 · Score: 5, Informative

WorldWideWeb.app and Doom have already been mentioned --- lengthy discussion of the former in the book _Weaving the Web_ by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, check the source for Doom.app and John Carmack's blog to learn how he feels about NeXTstep.

Other things:

- Altsys Virtuoso (this became Macromedia FreeHand)
- Lotus Improv (which lives on as Quantrix or Flexisheet)
- MusicKit
- MiscKit
- Pages by Pages
- TouchType.app

Other more recent developments:

- Cenon - http://www.cenon.info
- GNUmail
- ProjectCenter
- GORM

William

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OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by Florian · 2004-10-19 02:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

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]...

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1. Re:OpenStep vs. KDE and Gnome by muecksteiner · 2004-10-19 02:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
Informative background by Pan+T.+Hose · 2004-10-19 02:25 · Score: 4, Informative

I've been around computers a long time and i've never heard of it. What major application can anyone mention that has been developed on it? A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate... I like the idea of it, but i'm not sure it's as wonderful of a hit as this news article is trying to make it seem.... Or am i off the mark here?
Apparently.
In the future, when you so desperately want to learn about something, you can use Wikipædia, a free on-line encyclopædia:
OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principly developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed by NeXT. While originally built on a Mach-based Unix (such as the core of NeXTSTEP), versions of OPENSTEP were available for Solaris and Windows NT as well. Furthermore the OPENSTEP libraries (the libraries that shipped with the OPENSTEP operating system) are in fact a superset of the original OpenStep specification. The OpenStep API was created as the result of a 1993 collaboration between NeXT Computer and Sun Microsystems, allowing this cut-down version of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system object layers to be run on Sun's Solaris operating system (more specifically, Solaris on SPARC-based hardware). Most of the OpenStep effort was to strip away those portions of NeXTSTEP that depended on Mach or NeXT-specific hardware being present. This resulted in a smaller system that consisted primarily of Display PostScript, the Objective-C runtime and compilers, and the majority of the NeXTSTEP Objective-C libraries. Not included was the basic operating system, or the display system. The first draft of the API was published by NeXT in summer 1994. Later that year they released an OpenStep compliant version of their flagship operating system NeXTSTEP running on several of their supported platforms and rebranded it OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP remained NeXT's primary operating system product until they were purchased by Apple Computer in 1997. OPENSTEP was then combined with technologies from the existing Mac OS to produce Mac OS X. Sun never seemed terribly interested in the product, likely a result of the NIH syndrome. In fact it's somewhat unclear why they were ever interested, although it appears it was an attempt to "get in" on the object-oriented operating system market before Microsoft released its plans for the object-oriented Cairo OS (which never happened). Nevertheless they started their port to Solaris some time in 1994, and released it in 1996. When Sun started work on Java just after this point, Solaris OpenStep was never seen again.
NeXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NeXTSTEP 1.0 was released on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 series processors (specifically the original black boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC). About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2. The format of the name had many camel case variants, initially being NextStep, then NeXTstep, then NeXTSTEP, and became NEXTSTEP (all

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Re:Qt acheived this already by OmniVector · 2004-10-19 02:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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