Re: GNUstep, Google Summer of Code, and an idea

[Robert Slover]

The guys doing the Objective-J/Cappucino/280-North stuff just seem to have 
disappeared.  No activity on any of those web sites in over a year.  These 
tools were starting to look really great, too.

Did anyone see the 'Atlas' Web-GUI Builder Demo?:  http://280atlas.com/what.php

A web-based 'back' implementation this smooth for GNUStep would be an awesome 
tool.

--Robert

On Apr 4, 2011, at 6:42 PM, David Chisnall wrote:

> Hi Lars,
> 
> On 4 Apr 2011, at 22:46, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf wrote:
> 
>> today a co-worker of mine brought the Cappucino-Project to my attention. 
>> 
>> http://cappuccino.org/ is a JavaScript based Web-Framework which basically 
>> implements the Cocoa-API using "Objective-J" which is a funky JavaScript 
>> dialect modeled after Objective-C but implemented in JavaScript itself (it 
>> sits on top so to say. 
> 
> I've seen Cappucino before, and in part it was the inspiration for this 
> project. I don't really like their Objective-J language, so much though, 
> because it is just different enough from Objective-C that the differences 
> bite you.
> 
> It produces some really beautiful output though, and we did consider using 
> some of their code for web apps made with Étoilé (they actually use some 
> GNUstep code - at least according to their documentation, I've not looked at 
> their code much), but I'm too lazy to write view classes in two languages.
> 
>> While I consider programming in "Objective-J" itself rather weird the 
>> existence of such a framework only points out the importance of David's 
>> idea. The world™  seems to be in need of viable web toolkits! 
> 
> Absolutely.  There are only a few thousand.  Definitely one more is needed!
> 
>> And I like the GWT (Google Web Toolkit)-like approach of David of compiling 
>> to JavaScript better than writing in "Objective-J" which would IMHO only 
>> feasible for people already living in the JavaScript-Land. Those people – on 
>> the other hand – know the Cocoa API very rarely.
> 
> It would also be nice if we could use the same thing with our UIKit 
> implementation (when it exists) - compile it for the web, and let people turn 
> iPhone apps into web apps with a simple recompile.
> 
>> So I consider this an important project for GNUstep even if we don't find a 
>> student for this (which means we need to implement this ourselves). 
> 
> The code is in trunk/Languages/ObjC2JS in étoilé svn currently, for anyone 
> who wants to play with it.  In the test directory, you will find the 
> JavaScript run-time support code (implements the C memory model and the 
> Objective-C object model in terms of JavaScript), along with some .m files 
> that contain tests (which all work, for me at least).  There is also a 
> jstest.html.  This includes all of the run-time support scripts and 
> jstest.js, then calls the main() function.  To test one of the files, just 
> compile it to jstest.m and open this html file with your browser (tested with 
> FireFox 4 - should also work with Chrome and the WebKit nightly builds[1]).  
> All of the bits of C that I have tested work, with three exceptions:
> 
> - 64-bit integers don't work, and aren't high up my todo list (ObjC2JS uses 
> an ILP32 model)
> - Casting integers to pointers does not work (although pointer arithmetic 
> does, as does casting pointers to integers).  This is basically impossible in 
> JavaScript, so I have no plans to implement it.
> - Bitfields.  These are horrible, but GNUstep uses them all over the place, 
> so I'll probably get around to it soon.
> 
> My next step is to implement some of the libc functions that we need (as 
> wrappers around their JavaScript equivalents, or as stubs), and add some 
> low-level classes like JSString, JSArray, JSDictionary as wrappers around 
> JavaScript objects, so that we can use their abstract superclasses from 
> GNUstep directly.  I also want to add either an implementation of -back, or 
> an implementation of CoreGraphics + some event handling using the canvas tag. 
>  We can probably implement CoreAnimation quite easily, since canvas elements 
> themselves are effectively layers, and can be animated with a variety of 
> techniques.
> 
> There are also a few things I need to add in the compiler.  Declared 
> properties as lvalues in unary and binary operations is currently broken 
> (e.g. a.b++; or a.b += 2, where a is an object and b is a property) and 
> exceptions are not implemented (these are trivial to do, wrapping JavaScript 
> exceptions).
> 
> I probably won't bother with C++ support, because it is a horrible language, 
> unless someone wants to pay me a lot of money for it.
> 
> Anyway, my slightly rambling point is that I plan on spending some time 
> working on this, and patches are always welcome...
> 
> David
> 
> [1] I use some JavaScript stuff to implement the C object model that are 
> added for WebGL.  It's possible to implement (slow) versions of these in pure 
> JavaScript, which I'll probably do at some point if I need compatibility with 
> other browsers.
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