[Newbie] Some cross-platform cocoa->win queries...

[Angus Gratton]

Hi folks,

I have some questions about using GNUStep on a couple of 
largely-proprietary OSes.

I want to port my application to Cocoa and Win32. It's currently 
running on Classic MacOS, and I want to rewrite it from the ground up 
(due to antiquated and ugly code in the old version which more "grew" 
than was designed...)

I'm pretty new to Cocoa and very new to Windows programming.

I want to use a User Interface <-> Backend approach where the 
"Backend" objects support the user interface but both are quite 
autonymous. My backend mostly needs to use string and array routines, 
but will also come to link to sound libraries (quite possibly 
QuickTime, at least on MacOS) and use file access methods.

I was hoping I could do the following:

On Cocoa, write an AppKit interface and FoundationKit backend (model).

On Windows, use GNUStep FoundationKit to incorporate the backend from 
the Cocoa version and then use GRAPE (an Eiffel graphical interface 
creation tool http://www.elj.com/elj-win32/grape) to make the 
interface.

GRAPE/Eiffel can both incorporate C/C++ directly or, if I first 
compile the backend to a DLL, call API functions...

My questions are:

1) Is it possible to do this?

2) Is it sane to try to do this? Should I bite the bullet, buy 
Microsloth Visual C++, and re-write it all from the ground up again?

3) If it is possible to do what I hope, will my app become dependent 
on so much GNUStep stuff that the average Windows user would not want 
to download/install it?

4) Is the FoundationKit stable on Win32?

5) Can I get away with it without using a M$ compiler (using 
CYGWIN/gcc/lcc-win32?)

6) How's support for non-standard scripts, Unicode, etc. in the 
FoundationKit? (this part will probably be mostly dependent on 
GRAPE's support for Windows encoding types...)


Any info, experiences, that anyone can relate would be _greatly_ 
welcomed. I think the idea of GNUStep is just plain awesome; the 
stories of taking Cocoa code and compiling it first-pop on Linux 
sound too good to be true!!


Angus
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