[SwarmFest2004] development report submission

[Scott Christley]

Scott Christley
University of Notre Dame
address@hidden


Swarm and GNUstep Development Report
====================================

In this report, I discuss the development efforts to allow Swarm
applications to work within the GNUstep environment; the result is
that Swarm acts like a third-party library within the GNUstep
environment allowing Swarm to utilize existing GNUstep functionality.

GNUstep's website at http://www.gnustep.org describes GNUstep as 'a
free, standard, object-oriented, cross-platform development meant to
provide generalized visual interface design, a cohesive user
interface, and look good as well. GNUstep is based on and completely
compatible with the OpenStep specification developed by NeXT (now
Apple Computer Inc.). GNUstep also implements many additional classes
and methods, some from the Cocoa API for the sake of
compatibility. GNUstep is written in the object-oriented language
"Objective-C", a superset of C which adds object-orientation to C.'

The development project has several milestones and long-term goals:

1) Remove usage of Swarm's internal libobjc and use the standard
  Objective-C runtime provided with the GNU compiler.

2) Package Swarm as a third-party library within the GNUstep Makefile
  system so that it can be asily incorporated into GNUstep
  applications.

3) Have Swarm's simulation scheduling mechanism work alongside
  GNUstep's graphical event processing.

4) Replace Tcl/Tk/BLT graphical interface with a GNUstep one.

5) Replace some Swarm internal implementations with GNUstep classes.

6) Allow Swarm classes, both internal and user-defined agents, to be a
  palette in GORM.

7) Creation of a Swarm application type within ProjectCenter to
  provide a set of template files with some standard classes, menus,
  and windows pre-defined for the user.

The current progress of these milestones, any issues encountered
during the development process, work still to be done, and some
exciting future prospects will be presented.