Re: JXTA for ObjC (was: Re: a simple program)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, August 17, 2001, at 08:50 AM, Aurelien wrote:

> Richard, Thank you very much. Now I think I understand that Objective-C 
> is no real replacement for C, but an extension of C in the first place, 
> so for example GUI programming can be done more smoothly. For system 
> programming, you're still bound to using plain C, or a mix of objc and 
> C.

Well, ObjC is a superset of C, so you don't really use a mix of ObjC and 
C, you just use ObjC :-)
Think of it as having a resource of a huge number of existing ObjC 
libraries and system calls that
were written with non object oriented design.  Generally you might want 
to use nice new OO libraries,
but you can always fall back on the old ones.

Of course, you can use Java and other code libraries too, but not with 
complete transparency.

> I'd like to share thoughts about the pros and cons of an objc binding 
> for the JXTA platform.
>
> JXTA is a p2p platform meant to provide a common ground for all kinds 
> of existing and future p2p software. It offers a shell and a GUI and, 
> as of now, is strictly written in Java. Basically though, JXTA is only 
> a specification and fundamentally cross-platform. A C binding is now 
> being written.
>
> I think JXTA is groundbreaking, because it finally provides a 
> specification for cross-platform distributed computing.

Yep ... looking at the JXTA pages, it seems that GNUstep DO does most of 
that stuff (and more), but only between
GNUstep apps (though it operates between multiple operating systems and 
hardware architectures).
It would be nice to have a system that operated between GNUstep and 
non-GNUstep (other than CORBA ... which is
extremely clumsy for p2p).

> I would like confirmation on the following assumptions about ObjC:
>
> - It is possible to make Obj-C GUIs have the look-and-feel of all 
> existing platform (perhaps by using QT in the back-end);

Of course ... though that would be using the base library, not the gui 
(which is written to have the NeXTstep look
and feel rather than a native one).

> - ObjC can be ported to handheld devices;

It's GCC ... free software, so it vcan be ported anywhere.  In practice, 
it's likely to be basically
available on any architecture, but might need the ffcall library porting 
to obscure processor architectures
in order to support invocations and distributed objects.