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

[Willem Rein Oudshoorn]

Angus Gratton <angusgr@dingoblue.net.au> writes:

> 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?

Well, it is a broad question.

Compiling your Foundation backend on GNUstep/Windows should
be quite easy.  

Disclaimer, Although I have ported a medium
sized project (+/- 180.000 lines of code) without problems
to GNUstep  base, and we did test GNUstep on windows.
However we have not ported the application to GNUstep on windows itself.


I do know nothing about GRAPE/Eiffel so can not comment on that.
But interfacing on C level should work.  However I think eventually
you want to interface on a `higher' level than C-functions.  
The hard part will probably be defining the interface between
the backend and your frontend.  Catering for AppKit and GRAPE.
 
> 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?

Really depends.  If the backend is quite large I would try first the
GNUstep path.  If the backend is tightly coupled with the user interface
or rather small rewriting it with Microsoft tools seems a more suitable
approach.

> 
> 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?
>
Why not distribute the various DLL's with your application?  No need
to burden the user with installing the GNUstep installation process itself.
 
> 4) Is the FoundationKit stable on Win32?

As far as I know, YES.
 
> 5) Can I get away with it without using a M$ compiler (using
> CYGWIN/gcc/lcc-win32?)

CYGWIN works for GNUstep.  But I think you should use MingW, as 
far as I know there is/was someone working on GNUstep with MingW.
Also, depending on the license of your program cygwin might not
be an option. But you should ask cygwin about that, on their
website it seems that you can negotiate a license deal with them.

> 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...)

I do not know.


Wim Oudshoorn