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Gratuitous Book Plug!
Posted on 19 December 2009 by
Today's blog post isn't really about Étoilé, so feel free not to read it. Instead, I'm going to talk about my new book: Cocoa Programming Developer's Handbook.
Étoilé is based on GNUstep, which implements the same set of core APIs as Apple's Cocoa. Both implement the OpenStep specification and both extend it in various ways. GNUstep tries to follow Cocoa's extensions and a number of GNUstep's extensions are available on OS X via the GNUstep Additions framework.
Apart from one appendix, covering porting Cocoa applications, the book does not contain much specific to GNUstep (although a few of the examples are based on Étoilé code). That doesn't mean that it's completely useless to GNUstep and Étoilé developers, however. Most chapters contain something relevant to people on other platforms:
1 Cocoa and Mac OS X talks about the history of OpenStep and Cocoa and where it fits into OS X.
2 Cocoa Language Options introduces Objective-C and discusses the choice of compilers. Most of this is applicable to GNUstep. I don't think there are Python bindings for GNUstep, but there are Java and Ruby bridges. For Étoilé, of course, you can use LanguageKit and write Smalltalk code.
3 Using Apple's Developer Tools introduces XCode and Interface Builder, which are specific to OS X. The introduction to Objective-C and the conventions in Cocoa, which account for most of this chapter, are relevant to GNUstep developers.
4 Foundation: The Objective-C Standard Library introduces the Foundation framework. Aside from the section on Core Foundation, everything here should be relevant to GNUstep - I finished the NSCache implementation before the book was published - and support for Core Foundation APIs in GNUstep is under development.
5 Application Concepts introduces the core concepts in the AppKit. Everything here should apply to GNUstep-gui.
6 Creating Graphical User Interfaces covers more of AppKit. I've not tried using Cocoa Bindings, which this chapter explains, with GNUstep. The code looks as if it would work, but there is no interface in GORM for connecting them so you'd need to do that in code (or improve GORM).
7 Windows and Menus also mainly covers things that will work in GNUstep. Note that GNUstep doesn't support sheets (yet). The same APIs work, but you get window-modal dialog boxes instead.
8 Text in Cocoa talks about the Cocoa text system. Most of this is unchanged from OpenStep and should work with GNUstep. There are a few bits that won't. Rather embarrassingly, one of the examples didn't compile with GNUstep because of a typo in a GNUstep header (fixed now). Fred is doing some great work on the text system at the moment, so if any of it doesn't work then it probably will soon.
9 Creating Document-Driven Applications introduces the NSDocument family, which is very well supported by GNUstep. You can take the Apple developer examples that explore this part of the system and compile them with pbxbuild without any problems.
10 Core Data introduces the Core Data framework. GNUstep provides the gscoredata framework, which is intended to be a drop-in replacement. I've not used this (Étoilé's CoreObject is nicer), but apparently it works.
11 Working with Structured Data describes the more complex view classes in AppKit. NSCollectionView doesn't yet exist in GNUstep, but EtoileUI provides a nicer way of producing this kind of layout (and works on both GNUstep and Cocoa).
12 Dynamic Views talks about modifying the view hierarchy at run time. All of this is standard OpenStep stuff with the exception of the part talking about full-screen applications. This uses some low-level Quartz calls, which won't work with GNUstep.
13 Custom Views teaches you how to write your own views. The CoreGraphics stuff won't work with GNUstep yet, although we have a partial implementation of CoreGraphics in Étoilé svn and are trying to get it moved into GNUstep. The section on creating Interface Builder palettes may also not be directly applicable to GNUstep. Gorm supports palettes in a similar way, but I don't know how similar the interfaces are. This is only important if you are packaging a framework with new view objects for third-party developers and want to add a little polish.
14 Sound and Video contains a lot that is specific to OS X. None of the QuickTime stuff will work with GNUstep, although Étoilé's MediaKit fills the same rôle (and might work on OS X). I committed support for speech synthesis to GNUstep a while ago, but speech recognition is still missing. If anyone wants to wrap (Pocket)Sphinx and implement NSSpeechRecognizer before I get around to it, patches are most welcome!
15 Advanced Visual Effects covers a lot of stuff that is only available on OS X. CoreAnimation, CoreImage, and Quartz Composer only work on OS X. OpenGL works on any platform and there have been some patches added to GNUstep's NSOpenGLView recently by people porting Cocoa apps or writing OpenGL apps from scratch with GNUstep.
16 Supporting PDF and HTML covers PDFKit and WebKit. Gregory is currently working on porting WebKit to GNUstep, so these examples should work in the next few months. PopplerKit in Étoilé svn provides a lot of the same features as PDFKit, but is GPL'd. Writing a new PDF framework is on my TODO list, but it's a very long way down so don't hold your breath...
17 Searching and Filtering covers SearchKit and Spotlight, which are not available off OS X. Étoilé's LuceneKit, based on Apache Lucene, is very similar to SearchKit. The NSPredicate stuff in this chapter is also relevant to GNUstep, and Étoilé uses predicates in a few places.
18 Contacts, Calendars, and Secrets covers the Address Book, Calendar Store and Keychain APIs. We have an implementation of the Address Book APIs in svn, which we will be replacing soon with one built on top of CoreObject. The Calendar Store API is quite simple, but hasn't yet been reimplemented. I have an implementation of the subset of the Keychain API that I talk about in this chapter somewhere, which I'll commit once I've finished tidying it (it's difficult to do securely without Mach ports).
19 Pasteboards covers the pasteboard APIs. These are the same on GNUstep, although the 10.6 APIs (which are much, much, cleaner) aren't implemented yet. I like these APIs a lot, so I'll probably implement them soon.
20 Services covers the system services mechanism that Apple inherited from NeXT. This is one of my favourite features of GNUstep and works well. We have a few things that use it in svn.
21 Adding Scripting talks about AppleScript. If you read and understand these APIs, you'll know why no one has bothered reimplementing them. This chapter is around 30 pages. You can describe how to do the same thing with Étoilé's ScriptKit in about half a page.
22 Networking talks about sockets, NSStream, the URL loading system, distributed objects, and Bonjour. All of these should work with GNUstep, although I've not tested NSNetService.
23 Concurrency talks about various ways of writing parallel code. The NSOperation implementation in GNUstep is quite immature, so probably won't work. Grand Central works on FreeBSD, but not yet anywhere else.
24 Portable Cocoa is obviously relevant to GNUstep.
25 Advanced Tricks covers some tricks with the runtime system. Most of these work as-is on non-Apple platforms, and a few have example code for the GNU runtime.
A lot of the examples from the book use declared properties, so if you want to try them with GNUstep you'll need to use clang (and either libobjc2 or link Étoilé's Objective-C 2 framework). I found declared properties very useful in writing concise code for the examples and this provided me with the motivation to get them working on GNUstep (they do now).
InformIT sells both the printed copy and the (DRM-free PDF) eBook edition, while Amazon has the dead-tree edition for a bit less.
