Swarm and GNUstep

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

As this is my firts post to this list, let me introduce myself. I am a student 
of Slovak University of Technology and as part of my thesis I am going to write 
some king of multi-agent based simulation tool (virtual laboratory). Besides 
other key features it has to be multi-platform and easy to use and install by 
non-computer literate. I was considering several options including Swarm and 
GNUstep. Swarm already has some simulation classes I need, but I am missing 
some features that GNUstep has. So I was thinking about combinig the two (Swarm 
and GNUstep).

I cannot install Swarm properely on my system, because it uses it's own libobjc 
and I need to use the one included in latest GCC for GNUstep.

GNUstep is powerful set of ObjectiveC libraries: Base and Gui derived from 
OpenStep/Cocoa Foundation and AppKit frameworks respectively. The Base library 
is mature set of classes for containers, object archivers, threads, bundles 
etc... It includes mechanisms like - reference counting garbage collection 
(Boehm GC is experimental)
- distributed objects
- object coding (serialization) - key-valu coding (accessing object properties 
by their names). The Gui library includes all kinds of views including matrices 
and table view. And because it uses Display PostScript drawing on screen it is 
easy to create a postscript data/file from view (ie you can create an EPS file 
from graph just by redirecting the output from screen to a file). Moreover 
GNUstep includes applications for creating projects (ProjectCenter) and user 
interfaces (Gorm) - like OSX Project and Interface Builder. In GNUstep project 
you just have to create single makefile for all of GNUstep platforms (including 
Windows and OSX).

Now I have two options: create a simulation library for GNUstep or port Swarm 
to GNUstep. It seems that both will take same amount of work (because swarm 
uses a bit different mechanisms for objects that GNUstep does). By porting 
Swarm I mean also replacing Swarm's Tcl/Tk GUI by pure ObjectiveC GUI provided 
by GNUstep.

What do you think about the idea of combinig Swarm with GNUstep?

References:
 GNUstep: http://www.gnustep.org
 Cocoa: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/CocoaTopics.html
 Gorm: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/Gorm.html

All comments are welcome.
Thank you,

Stefan Urbanek
http://urbanek.host.sk


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