1. GNUStep - A Route Somewhat More Likely to Succeed

The GNUStep system is taking a rather more cooperative "crosshosting" approach. There are numerous GNUStep applications that work and that are reasonably useful atop X.

The ultimate target was for them eventually to be displayed using the GNUStep GUI X/DPS Backend, which will be based on the "Display GhostScript" package being written by Aladdin Software. As "DGS" has not been readily available, the GNUStep system has allowed the use of native X, with Cairo as the "hopefully preferable" target.

This provides a migration path where the environment can evolve non-destructively around the applications as we might move from:

• Running GS apps atop X, the common situation at present, to

• Running GS apps atop Cairo atop X, and, perhaps later, to

• Running GS "natively" atop a version of Cairo (or, more wishfully, DGS) that runs directly atop some substrate akin to GGI , thus eliminating the need for X.

In fact, Display Postscript has been effectively obsolesced in favor of Cairo and XRender.

A similar migration could be done for Tk-based applications, Qt applications, and GTk , albeit with somewhat greater difficulty, as these graphics systems were not explicitly designed with an abstract model such as Display PostScript as ultimate target "platforms." It is more likely that applications written for them include X-specific dependencies.

• GNUstep: Progress Overview

• Wikipedia on GNUstep

• Richard Frith-Macdonalds GNUstep stuff

• Greg testing framework

  Greg is a Guile Scheme-based framework in which to set up formal system tests.

• GNUstep project test suite

• GNUstep ProjectCenter

• Getting GNUStep updates:

  export CVSROOT=":pserver:anoncvs@cvs.net-community.com:/gnustep"

  cvs login

  password: anoncvs

  cvs -z3 checkout core cvs -z3 update

• The book Developing Business Applications With Openstep is available that may prove helpful to new GNUStep developers...

• The PSV - Postscript Viewer might be built into a display substrate to allow GnuStep to run atop GGI rather than atop X.

• GNUstep European Mirror

• *Step software that may be available gratis

• Phil's OpenStep Software Corner

• Jigs - GNUstep Java Interface

  It allows you to access the GNUstep libraries (and any library based on GNUstep) from java as if they were java libraries, and, vice-versa, to access java objects from objective-C as if they were objective-C objects

• GnuStep TouchType

  Tool to do "touch-up" on EPS files; allows shifting characters around to do special effects...

• GWorkspace.app

  A file accessor application, also found as GWorkspace.app .

• GNUstep Renaissance

  GNUstep Renaissance is an advanced framework for creating portable user interfaces. It works on top of gnustep-gui (and of Apple OSX Cocoa under Apple), and provides an easy and powerful way to create and manage user interfaces.

• Lighthouse Apps

• Lighthouse's memorial site

1.1. A bit of "ranting" about NeXTstep

(A very little bit of ranting.)

One of the great "losses" in modern computing has been the rise and (arguably) fall of the NeXTstep system. (Although since most of it, with the exception of DPS, returned to become the Mac OS-X platform, there's a potent argument that it "rose again".) Some of its major features include:

• The use of Objective C, a "truly" object-oriented language that joins together the strengths of Smalltalk and C,

• The use of Display PostScript as the display "substrate," thereby providing truly "What You See Is What You Get" capabilities,

• A graphical user interface powerful enough to be a "front end" to Unix,

• A set of graphical development tools built to join the above components together so as to rapidly develop very powerful applications.

Probably the most famous application developed on NeXTstep was Lotus Improv.

See also Apple-NeXT - The Past History