Re: Nib compatibility branch merged to baseline.

[Gregory John Casamento]

Hey Peter,

Thanks for the kind words. :)

The changes needed to Gorm to support nibs are a bit more complex than many people might think.  The complexity lies in the fact that there are some internal data structures which are used by nibs to maintain relationships between objects within the nib files (not just connections... there's more :) this is somewhat similar to gorms).  I need to understand these so that a nib can be loaded properly into Gorm and edited and saved as either a gorm or a nib. :)

I am in the process of refactoring parts of Gorm to allow Nibs to be read and then saved as gorm files.   This is the first step.  The second step is to make it so that the encoding for each class in gui works properly so that nibs can be written.   This is the really hard part, since I will need to test with IB on OSX to make sure we are producing decent nib files. :)

Part of the journey along the way to making this happen is to make Gorm utilize the NSDocument classes in gui, which it currently doesn't use, it currently implements it own document-based architecture, but doesn't use those classes.   The NSDocument* classes will make it easier to implement undo and other features and will result in a net reduction/simplification of code in Gorm.

I'm hoping to make some siginificant progress on this in the coming days.  I will hopefully have something to show by next week. :)  The changes I am making for Gorm will be on the NibCompatibility branch, until they are in a state where they are stable enough to consider merging.

Later, GJC
--
Gregory John Casamento

----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Cooper <comrade@obverse.com.au>
To: Gregory John Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com>
Cc: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org; GNUstep Developers <gnustep-dev@gnu.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2006 12:13:22 PM
Subject: Re: Nib compatibility branch merged to baseline.

Hello

> Please check out the latest SVN and take a look.   I also checked in
> the
> changes to Gorm and to gormtest, which now includes nibs as well as
> the
> normal gorm files to test out loading.

I've got to say, gormtest is visually impressive - it's amazing to see
all those nibs come up in the interface. I don't think I ever expected
this to be done.

It's one of the key changes to allow easy porting from OS X to other
platforms, and therefore a key to ongoing use of GNUstep and therefore
a positive step to ensure the inevitable victory of software libre ;-)

> The changes to Gorm.app consist only of those necessary to make it
> compile
> with the changes.  I am working on the necessary modifications to
> Gorm.app
> and to gui to allow for writing nibs as well.  This is "phase 2" of
> this
> effort.

I was looking at the phase 2 changes required - it looks like only a
little code will be required to open nibs, mainly in GormDocument.m (I
think, mainly supporting nib bundles from the document open dialog and
hooking into the nibcompatibility class for deserialisation, somewhat
like the code for gorms, yes?). Would there be other extensive changes
required to be able to read nibs and save them as gorms?

This is really really great!

Peter



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