Re: ANNOUNCE: GNUstep Renaissance is out!

[Gregory Casamento]

Nicola,

Instead of building a GUI builder from scratch it would make sense, I think,
for Gorm to support the creation of different GUI formats.   Currently only the
.gorm format is supported (obviously), but I think that creating bundles which
would provide support for outputting different formats would greatly expand the
capabilities of Gorm and would allow Renaissance to leverage the work which has
gone into making Gorm more stable and usable over the past year.

Later, GJC

--- Nicola Pero <nicola@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
> I am very excited to announce the first public release of GNUstep
> Renaissance.
> 
> GNUstep Renaissance is meant to provide us with a new, revolutionary way
> of writing GNUstep applications.
> 
> In a few words, GNUstep Renaissance replaces .nib (and .gorm and .gmodel)
> files with .gsmarkup files.
> 
> .gsmarkup files are plain XML files with a syntax designed to be very
> easily edited by hand.  Rather than encoding all the internal details of
> objects to disk, in the way that .nib and .gorm (and, in a similar way,
> .gmodel do), .gsmarkup files contain a simple logical description of what
> the user interface is meant to be.
> 
> That way, .gsmarkup files are easy to edit, and avoid completely the
> portability problems that affect all previous technologies (.nib, .gorm,
> .gmodel).
> 
> .gsmarkup do not encode absolute positions and sizes of widgets in the way
> .nib, .gorm and .gmodel do.  GNUstep Renaissance provides box objects and
> intelligent default autolayout behaviour.  All widgets positions and sizes
> are automatically computed at run time.
> 
> As another beneficial side effect, .gsmarkup are very easily translated.  
> You just provide a .strings file with the translations, and GNUstep
> Renaissance automatically replacese the strings with their translations at
> run time.  No need to generate a separate interface for each language!
> 
> There is more than this :-) but I'm trying to make a very short summary
> (and easy to grasp).
> 
> Just a last thing - outlets and connectors have been integrated really
> neatly in the XML files.
> 
> I have personally ported GNUstep Renaissance to run on Apple OSX 10.2.3.  
> This means that *any* application using .gsmarkup files for its interfaces
> will compile and run exactly the same on GNUstep and Apple OSX.  GNUstep
> Renaissance finally smashes down the .nib portability barrier!! :-)
> 
> As demonstrators, GNUstep Renaissance includes a few applications -
> CurrencyConverter, Calculator, Finger - which use .gsmarkup files for
> their interfaces, and compile, build and run without changes in source
> code between GNUstep and Apple OSX.  I also ported Gomoku to run in the
> same way, but I'd like to keep it separate.
> 
> Portability works - there is only one real tweak - menus need to be build
> from separate files for the two platforms.  The reason is that the menu
> layouts and conventions differ so much between the two platforms, that to
> have your menus look & feel 'native', you really have to have
> platform-specific menus.
> 
> The future of GNUstep Renaissance will include a graphical .gsmarkup
> editor.  A clone of IB/Gorm if you want, possibly derived from Gorm.  The
> application itself will be written using GNUstep Renaissance, and so will
> hopefully run on both GNUstep and Apple OSX, putting a final end of the
> story to any .nib portability problem.
> 
> Before starting work on the IB clone, I want to finalize the .gsmarkup and
> autolayout API and documentation.
> 
> Last, I want to point out that GNUstep Renaissance is experimental
> software, and the internals (and probably part of the public APIs too) are
> bound to change a lot still.  Keep in mind that it's alpha software,
> experimental, and I'm making it public not because it's finished but
> because ... well because it's enough powerful and usable that it really
> makes no longer sense to keep it locked inside my laptop(s). :-)
> 
> GNUstep Renaissance is free software (LGPL), and it's part of the GNUstep
> suite; it is available on gnustep's CVS, under
> 
>  dev-libs/Renaissance
> 
> I suppose the CVS command to get it should be something like 
> 
>   cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/gnustep login
> 
>   cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/gnustep co
> dev-libs/Renaissance
> 
> If you want to try it out on Apple OSX, you need gnustep-make from CVS in
> order to compile GNUstep Renaissance from sources (you don't need it to
> use the framework, but I don't provide a binary distribution at the
> moment).  Full instructions inside Renaissance.
> 
> If you want to try it out on GNUstep, just grab Renaissance.
> 
> I personally recommend that everyone interested in GNUstep with some spare
> time gives Renaissance a quick try to get a feeling of what it's about.
> :-)
> 
> I didn't want to release it :-) because I know there is still a lot of
> work to do to bring it to real maturity and perfection.  But - but it's
> nearly nine months I've started playing with it, and I can't keep it
> locked in my laptop forever, so no matter how imperfect it is, it's now
> time to make it public - and here it is, for your fun and delight,
> Renaissance is out! :-)
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep


=====
Gregory John Casamento
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