Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Fred Kiefer]

Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> One more thing...  It says that they spent two months adding:
> 
> • Added unicode path support to the NSFileManager class.
> • Added support for displaying truncated strings.
> • Added support for drawing unicode strings. (Not very pretty support.)
> • Fixed some issues with the NSSocket implementation.
> • Worked around or fixed a number of UI bugs. (It was similar to trying
> to get a Cocoa UI to look right in both OS X 10.4 and 10.5.)
> • Since Cocotron is not a complete implementation, we had to implement
> some methods ourselves, filling in the Windows implementation of the
> required Cocoa routines. A few examples:
> - [NSPropertyList dataFromPropertyList:] (for binary property lists)
> - [NSImage TIFFRepresentation]
> - [NSFileManager subpathsAtPath:]
> - [NSWorkspace iconForFile:]
> - [NSMutableString replaceOccurrencesOfString:withString:option:]
> • Additionally, Ken posted a few issues/requests to the Cocotron Google
> Group, and the team responded amazingly fast; they even implemented some
> functionality that we needed.
> 
> GNUstep already has all of the above mentioned methods.  I'll mentioned
> this on the blog-page you gave.
> 

I think this is not completely true. At least I think that
• Added support for displaying truncated strings.
is still on the list of the thinks to do :-)

But all of this is not the point here. This isn't about my system is
more complete then yours, or is it?
We all know that GNUstep has more features implemented than Cocotron, it
also is the much older project. What I still find fascinating with
Cocotron is how it appeals to Cocoa developers that don't want to leave
there original development platform and still deliver applications for
MS Windows. What Cocotron achieved here is unmatched by GNUstep. We
should accept that and try to match this instead of pointing to the
shortcomings Cocotron that has plenty. Why wont somebody sit down and
uses the Cocotron XCode environment to cross compile GNUstep to Windows?
I don't see any problem in using their development environment although
it isn't LGPL or GPL. As long as we don't mix the source code we should
be on the save side. With that done people wanting to port applications
from Cocoa to Windows have a fair choice. And of course I hope they
choose GNUstep as it is the project I develop for and which license I
prefer.
(For this to happen we will still have to work on our UI appearance.
Even with a better foundation and more features people are first
impressed by the look of an application)

And congratulation Cocotron!

Fred