Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 31 Oct 2008, at 15:48, Stéphane Corthésy wrote:

> Obviously, most people arguing here against Cocotron never tried to  
> play with it...
>
> I did during some months, as well as I played with GNUstep on OSX  
> some years ago.
>
> One of the points no one talked about is the easiness with which you  
> can distribute a Windows app built with Cocotron: you zip the .app  
> folder, copy and unzip it on another Windows machine and here you  
> are: no need to install anything else: no library, no service, no  
> registry modification! Maybe I'm wrong, as I haven't worked with  
> GNUstep since years, but IIRC for a GNUstep app to work on Windows,  
> you need to install several DLLs and their related resource files,  
> and need to install some services (for DO, etc.). With Cocotron,  
> your app is self-contained, like Mac apps. There is a minor  
> drawback, of course: the Cocotron frameworks (Foundation & AppKit)  
> are copied in the .app folder, thus making your binary a little  
> bigger than expected, but this is really a very minor drawback  
> nowadays. And there's no DO, but how many apps do need it?

GNUstep was changed a few years ago so that you can configure it to  
have the whole system inside the app folder, and it gets configured  
that way by default on windows.  So you *can* quite easily distribute  
standalone apps as simple sip archives of the .app folder.

Where Cocotron is easier (presumably) is that it puts everything  
inside the app folder by default, wheras with GNUstep you have to  
write a couple of lines in your makefile to copy the core stuff into  
the app folder if you want a standalone app.
Probably it would be a good extension for GNUstep-make (assuming  
Nicola hasn't done it already) to have it do the copy automatically on  
windows (or have another target such as 'standalone') to build  
standalone apps.

> About development, some people seem concerned about the need to  
> compile every time for Windows AND Mac, thus slowing down  
> development. It's not true: you build only the target you want to:  
> Windows OR Mac. You get two separate .app folders.
> For debugging the Windows target, you can even remote-debug it  
> through Xcode: you install the Windows app on the Windows computer/ 
> VM, then start debug it from within Xcode. I admit that in its  
> current state, this solution is not yet satisfying, as the custom  
> gdb is still in experimental state, but as you would say to defend  
> GNUstep: it's just a matter of modifying some C code, just a matter  
> of time ;-)

That sounds good ... I really think it would be nice if someone took  
the Cocotron XCode environment and adapted it to build GNUstep apps.   
That would combine the familiarity/ease-of-use for XCode developers  
from Cocotron with the more complete/robust API/implementaion provided  
by GNUstep.