Re: Could GNUStep allow for iPhone porting to Android?

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Sep 2011, at 14:45, Jackie Gleason wrote:

> I was playing around with a tutorial last night here, and it got me 
> thinking...
> 
> Now I am a noob to GNUStep but my understanding is that with a certain 
> toolchain you can develop iOS apps. Although I am interested in this too, 
> last night got me thinking, could it be integrated into the gnustep make in 
> order to work with ndk-build? I'm sure there are a variety of hardware 
> virtualizing issues, however, seems very possible.
> 
> Anyone have thoughts?

It's something that we've discussed a few times.  There are two requirements 
for porting iOS apps to Android with GNUstep:

- An implementation of UIKit (GNUstep has the AppKit framework from OS X, not 
the UIKit framework from iOS)
- An Android back end (the part that handles drawing, window management, and 
event handling)

I am currently playing with the WebOS device that HP sent me.  GNUstep-base 
seems to be working nicely on it, but it only provides two ways of 
communicating with user are via HTML5 or SDL.  I will probably go the HTML5 
route for now.  I wanted the device to play with my Objective-C to JavaScript 
converter.  The Canvas API is basically a JavaScript binding to CoreGraphics, 
so implementing CoreGraphics on top of it should be relatively trivial, and 
that would make porting iOS apps relatively painless.  The same approach might 
work for Android, since it also has a WebKit / V8 browser...

David

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