Has anyone brought up or considered a port of GnuSTEP to AmigaOS?

http://www.gnustep.org/information/Booklet.pdf

Or do people think it would be a boneheaded idea?

I'm not sure, having only recognized GnuSTEP tonight. But it seems like an interesting idea perhaps. I mean, GnuSTEP is apparently just NextSTEP's original API, libraries and RAD tools reimplemented. So, there is no Mach, or Darwin dependency in there. Apparently, it would be a wrapper layer on top of the Amiga SDK, so it shouldn't add significant weight or resource consumption.

Yet it would provide a migration path for the existing GnuSTEP applications, and MacOS X apps. Plus, enable the developers familiar with the Cocoa API to immediately target Amiga. If the GnuSTEP implementation of Cocoa could retain the Amiga look & feel, it would just be another way to build apps for the Amiga, but one that leverages existing applications and talent pool.

Perhaps it is much more complicated than that.

Java, Eclipse, Tomcat and Subversion are another development environment I'd love to have on Amiga. Without them, I simply can't use Amiga for work. However, to my knowledge, no one is working on that development environment either. I'd love to be mistaken.

Anyone looking into an Eclipse/Java port to Amiga? Anyone besides me wanting this port worse than bad? I've often found myself wondering, how huge a porting effort would it be to migrate Eclipse to Amiga? I know Java is unrealistic, but Eclipse... maybe not. Any thoughts?

Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 08:23 AM.
Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 08:21 AM.
Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 08:18 AM.
Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 08:16 AM.

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@jingof

Porting Sun's OpenJDK isn't unreasonable, but it's a big project.

Eclipse is written in Java, so you'd need to either port a compatible JVM like OpenJDK, compile the Java code directly to PowerPC assembly, or port/compile the Java code to another language.

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@jingof

Don't know gnustep. If there's important apps there, it's be nice to have to make porting easier. If there's nothing important that would use it, maybe prioritize other things. I don' tknow if OSX uses something based on this or not, but I would love to see something comparable to Wine for Linux that would allow OSX PowerPC binaries to run on OS4. Not an emulation, as I don't want to actually load up OSX itself, as shapeshifter or MacOnLinux would do, I just want the API and a loader for things to run more directly in OS4.

As for the development environment, we already have subversion.
http://os4depot.net/index.php?function=showfile&file=development/utility/subversion.lha

But Java, Eclipse, etc. No, those are lacking. I'd love to see Eclipse as well. amigabounty.net is working on putting together a set of bounties to encourage development of the Java native class libraries, so Jamiga engine will be useful. My motivation for suggesting Java there is for Eclipse on Amiga.

What is tomcat?

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@billt

Tomcat is a lightweight Java application server. More robust products include JBoss (quite popular, part of Red Hat's plan to take over the world), JRun (now defunct outside ColdFusion), and BEA (now Oracle WebLogic, I think). EDIT: GlassFish deserves mention, too, since it's Sun's open source application server.

Last edited by Trev on 18-Mar-2009 at 05:50 PM.

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more borked A1200/MBX1200z/Indivision
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@bilt

Quote:

I don' t know if OSX uses something based on [GnuSTEP] or not,

Turns out OS X is an evolution of NeXT's NeXTSTEP, not the original Apple Mac. Essentially, NeXT's OS and development environment became OS X and xCode. This is interesting because NeXT was the only 1980's OS and SDK that was even more ahead of its time than the Amiga.

Probably old news to most of you, but until recently, I just thought OS X was Mach based, not NeXTSTEP-based.

Isn't it interesting that when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, he immediately set to work in 1986 on what would eventually become OS X. Meanwhile, Apple floundered with Taligent etc.

Anyway, that's the tie to OS X, because GnuSTEP is an open reimplementation of NeXTSTEP, which OS X is based on. Therefore, OS X and GnuSTEP are not so far apart. So apparently, many are using it as a way of porting OS X apps to other platforms that run GnuSTEP.

Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 06:55 PM.
Last edited by jingof on 18-Mar-2009 at 06:54 PM.

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@jingof

Quote:

Therefore, OS X and GnuSTEP are not so far apart.

Cool. Which would also make it close to something you could wrap an OSX binary in and see it run on OS4. There's still a good bit of PowerPC apps/games out there for OSX...

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@billt

A source-compatible API is a far cry from a binary-compatible subsystem, and that's just one of the many APIs available to OS X programmers.

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@Trev

I never thought it would be trivial. :)

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@jingof
Quote:

Probably old news to most of you, but until recently, I just thought OS X was Mach based, not NeXTSTEP-based.

Actually, NeXTStep was Mach based, so in principle, you're right.

Anyhow, you might be interested in the Anubis project, which is heavily influenced by GNUStep.

Last edited by kolla on 19-Mar-2009 at 12:17 AM.

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@jingof

WindowMaker or AfterStep (don't recall, this MAY now BE GNUStep) may also be easier to port into Cygnix os4 environment..

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@Trev

Also, the applications to create GUIs (Gorm & Project Center) are not even close to Intuitively obvious in how they are used, nor is the only tutorials available anywhere close to up-to-date.

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@stychokiller

Quote:

stychokiller wrote: @Trev Also, the applications to create GUIs (Gorm & Project Center) are not even close to Intuitively obvious in how they are used, nor is the only tutorials available anywhere close to up-to-date.

Sounds just like Emperor, no?

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