Re: GNUStep and Cocoa Distributed Objects compatibility

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 22 Mar 2009, at 10:23, Piotr Isajew wrote:

> Hello
>
> I would like to use Distributed Objects to communicate through the  
> network between Objective C GNU Step application (let's say running  
> on Linux) and it's Mac OS X counterpart). Does anybody have any  
> experience using DO in such configuration? Is GNUStep's DO  
> implementation compatible with Cocoa's one?

No, the two implementations are not binary compatible, and making them  
compatible would be quite a big job (though it's certainly not  
impossible ... as we have a binary compatible implementation of keyed  
coding for NIBs already, and Nikolaus Schaler has written a binary  
compatible version of NSSocketPort for mySTEP which GNUstep could  
use ... so a project to implement binary compatible DO would need to  
re-implement NSConnection and NSPortCoder to use those).

Currently, for IPC between GNUstep and Cocoa I'd recommend using  
XMLRPC.  The GNUstep webservices library provides (as a tiny part of  
its functionality) an XMLRPC coder and invocation methods, and this  
library can be built/used either with gnustep-make (for gnustep) or  
with xcode (for cocoa).