Re: Where to start

[David Chisnall]

On 17 May 2011, at 22:23, John Doran wrote:

> Hi all, 
> Have just installed the environment and Project Center.

I don't use ProjectCenter, so I can't give you any advice there.

> I understand there's loads of examples around and plenty of resources but I'm 
> looking to be pointed in the right direction, I've just did the first hello 
> world example.

You can find some tutorials here:

http://www.gnustep.org/developers/documentation.html

> I'm new to objective c, I've come from Java(using Windows). Can anyone point 
> me in the direction of a good tutorial? I'm finding it hard to understand the 
> difference between Cocoa(iOSdevelopment) and GNUstep, is this a replication 
> of Cocoa or to be used in combination with a ui designer?

I am not sure what 'Cocoa(iOSdevelopment)' means.  Cocoa is Apple's name for a 
set of APIs for development on OS X, split across two frameworks:

- Foundation, which implements various low-level things (collections, strings, 
filesystem interaction, run loops, and so on).
- Application Kit (or AppKit), which implements things like windows, drawing, 
event handling, pasteboard interaction.

There is also Cocoa Touch, which also contains the Foundation framework, but 
uses UIKit instead of AppKit.  This is used for iOS development, and is not the 
same as Cocoa (although UIKit shares some features with AppKit).   

GNUstep aims to implement the same APIs as Cocoa (and, in theory, as Cocoa 
Touch, although very little progress has been made in that direction yet).  The 
GNUstep name comes from the OpenStep specification, jointly developed by NeXT 
and Sun.  Both GNUstep and Cocoa contains close to 100% complete 
implementations of OpenStep.  Both also contain extensions to this 
specification, and GNUstep aims to support all of the Cocoa extensions.

I am also not sure what you mean by 'or to be used in combination with a UI 
designer'.  The typical way of creating a GUI with Cocoa is to use Interface 
Builder, which is a graphical tool for creating serialised object graphs, 
typically containing view and controller objects that can be connected to a 
model when they are loaded.  GNUstep includes an application called GORM, which 
fills the same rôle.

David

-- Send from my Jacquard Loom