Re: Swarm futures (LONG)

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Thanks Jason for the comments,

You said "Rhapsody == OPENSTEP, so if Swarm runs on NeXT/OPENSTEP now,
it will run on Rhapsody.  There is also the free GNUstep implementation
in the works, which could address the need for portable, elegant, and
free GUI widgets." 

Unfortunately because of the X-Windows & Tk/Tcl dependency of the GUI
classes in Swarm it doesn't compile on NeXT/OpenStep. And regrettably
GNUStep is still under development and currently doesn't offer the same
great visual interface for browsing and debugging Objective-C code as
OpenStep.

Technically there might also be some differences in implementation
between Rhapsody and OpenStep, mainly in the GUI (Apple look and feel
instead of OpenStep look and feel etc.) I.e. another argument in favor
of a platform independent GUI (read: Java based GUI classes) for Swarm.

Also I noticed that I had mangled a sentence in my original message
(Swarm futures (LONG). Where it says:

"This would give us the killer combination of executing the ModelSwarm
on the existing SwarmKernel and visualizing the output either on the
server or from a remote kernel." <- I meant to say remote _client_. The
point is that with a Java based GUI we could offer people the
possibility of running and visualizing simulations on a remote client,
without installing Swarm on the client.

Regards,
-Benedikt


------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Center for Computable Economics     Tel. (310) 825-1777
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          http://cce.sscnet.ucla.edu