The popularity of OS X among geeks in recent years has led to a lot more people discovering OpenStep through Cocoa. GNUstep provides a much-needed Free Software alternative, as David Chisnall explains.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-01
Member since:2005-07-21
What do you mean by that.
As an aside, it seems to me inaccurate to describe KDE as being written in C++ since Qt itself uses MOC which sort of builds this language on top of C++ that really deserves to be considered it's own super set, not as drastically as C++ to C but along those same lines.
Are the internals of KDE written in pure C++ or are they also written in Qt ?
Member since:2005-07-16
didn't know if this expression translated in english or not -- it means .. hm, kind of overly complex, bloated. I'm not saying that about the frameworks themselves -- Qt is really neat -- but about the desktop itself. They tend to be in the "to be perfect is when you can't add anything more" category, while I'm in the "to be perfect is when you can't remove anything more" one.
As an aside, it seems to me inaccurate to describe KDE as being written in C++ since Qt itself uses MOC which sort of builds this language on top of C++ that really deserves to be considered it's own super set, not as drastically as C++ to C but along those same lines.
MOC is just a preprocessor that lets you adds signals and slots to your objects, indeed resulting in Qt beeing a much nicer library than many others.
It's also actually a bit similar to the way Objective-C works (sending messages), and obviously how you program with GNUstep/OpenStep/Cocoa (but imho, OpenStep is much better designed than Qt). Let's put it that way : if there were no Objective-C and OpenStep available, I certainly would code in Qt for GUI apps. As it is, I won't, because I'm vastly more productive with Objective-C and OpenStep (Cocoa or GNUstep).
Edited 2006-11-12 19:54
Member since:2006-01-01
Member since:
2005-07-16
Well, it depends where you place yourself -- as a developer, GNUstep is extremely well designed, and without a doubt was a much better foundation than Gnome or KDE to focus on ten years ago. But, few people had experience with OpenStep, hence the low participation on the project.
KDE and gnome actually started (partly) thinking that they were short-term solutions before GNUstep would be completed. Of course, while they gradually, iteratively evolved in interesting solutions and attracted more and more developers (and everybody knows it's easier to be attracted to a project that *works* right now, even if it means you'll need to redo everything every couple of years to get it right), GNUstep in the meantime didn't have much more developers, so while it progressed, it did so at a much lower pace, etc. A vicious circle.
So well, while it would have been preferable and much more efficient to work on GNUstep (specifically because the blueprint was/is so much better than the rest), the free software community is not a directed effort, and it's not surprising that people focused on short term gain instead of long-term efforts (it's also partly what happened in the Hurd vs Linux debate).
Anyway, that's the historical analysis; the question is more "ok, fine, but what's interesting about GNUstep now ?"
To that, well, the answer is simply that it is still an extremely well designed framework, and have inegaled tools like Gorm. As a framework to develop GUI applications, GNUstep (or Cocoa) is simply the best thing ever, really. Ask any developers that started playing with Cocoa or GNUstep, they don't want to go back to anything else.
Beside beeing very well architectured and rather well implemented, as a toolkit you get a lot of niceties for free (vector based drawing system, wysiwyg, services, distributed objects, notifications, serialisation, defaults, etc).
Now if you are talking from the point of view of a Gnome or KDE user (not as a developer), ... well, GNUstep is not a desktop, so you shouldn't really compare it ;-)
That's actually one of the "problem" in a way, of GNUstep; it's not a desktop, yet the frameworks provide the applications all they need to act as a cohesive whole -- so simply by using a bunch of GNUstep applications, they can cooperate and work together, well integrated, "as a desktop".
To have a "GNUstep-based" desktop, you can thus simply take a file manager like GWorkspace, use something like WindowMaker as a window manager, and use the apps, period. Such a desktop is imho interesting (compared to gnome or kde desktops) because of the tight cooperation between applications, because it's fast, because the UI are generally well crafted, by people that often care about ergonomy (not saying that gnome or kde are all bad, mind you, just that gnustep apps tend to "feel" cleaner to me -- and simply because it's so easy/fast to modify UI in GNUstep that you simply do it until you get them right).
If you want to try such a desktop, check the GNUstep live cd http://livecd.gnustep.org/ . Else, there is the étoilé project, which aims to create a gnustep-based desktop http://etoile-project.org (check the blog too http://www.etoile-project.org/etoile/blog/ )
Now, in what ways gnome and kde are superior ? Well, gnome is only superior in that it has legions of developers and some nice applications. KDE is technically very cool and already offers a nice desktop and cool applications, but technically I prefer GNUstep/ObjC to C++ (by far), and KDE tends to be a steam factory (?) -- from that point of view gnome tends to be cleaner (though the gnome framework is a complete mess).
Edited 2006-11-12 18:08