isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell) (12/04/90)
For those of you who are NeXT developers, have you found the Objective C
classes provided by NeXT to be sufficient? Because reusability of code is
supposed to be a feature of object oriented design, have you found that
purchasing/obtaining classes defined by others (Stepstone, etc.) has been
beneficial as opposed to your reinventing someone else's wheel? I would be
interested in your experiences and recommendations.
Thanks in advance.
--
_____ ____
Art Isbell |\ | | | | \ 315 Moon Meadow Lane
NeXT Registered Developer | \ | ___ |____| | | Felton, CA
isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU | \ | |___| | \ | | 95018-9442
(408)438-4736(B) | \| |___ | \ |___/ (408)335-1154(H)scott@mcs-server.gac.edu (Scott Hess) (12/04/90)
In article <9676@darkstar.ucsc.edu> isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell) writes:
For those of you who are NeXT developers, have you found the Objective C
classes provided by NeXT to be sufficient? Because reusability of code is
supposed to be a feature of object oriented design, have you found that
purchasing/obtaining classes defined by others (Stepstone, etc.) has been
beneficial as opposed to your reinventing someone else's wheel? I would be
interested in your experiences and recommendations.
I once started a post of the Stepstone Foundation Library (actually,
reverse engineering it from their documentation, as we don't have it
anywhere, here), and actually got quite far. I stopped, though, when
I realized that most of the stuff is supplied in some form or another
by NeXT's ObjC class library. Most of the array and collection stuff
is handled by List and Storage, Set by HashTable. All you miss are
Point, Rect, and String. I'll admit that the NeXT stuff is not so
flexible . . .
But, the reason I don't care is because I also realized that in many of
these cases, the C end of the deal was much more natural than Objective-C.
I found my String class simply wasn't really more useful than the use of
the string library, and it limited from doing stuff which I liked to do
(which would probably be the positive side :-). Also, since there's
no garbage collection, it really didn't give you a whole lot (since
you still had to make sure things were allocated/freed, and the like -
though the Objective-C-iffied versions looked nicer).
One thing that we are lacking on the NeXT is time. Given time, I would
bet there will be more class libraries. Right now, though, there's not
been the time for people to end up with a decent class that they think
the net might like to use and modify, so no one has really done it.
--
scott hess
scott@gac.edu
Independent NeXT Developer (Stuart)
GAC Undergrad (Horrid. Simply Horrid. I mean the work!)
<I still speak for nobody>glang@Autodesk.COM (Gary Lang) (12/04/90)
>For those of you who are NeXT developers, have you found the Objective C >classes provided by NeXT to be sufficient? Because reusability of code is >supposed to be a feature of object oriented design, have you found that >purchasing/obtaining classes defined by others (Stepstone, etc.) has been >beneficial as opposed to your reinventing someone else's wheel? I would be >interested in your experiences and recommendations. Yes on both accounts. I have found in writing my outliner that the Draw source, and the ICpak101 I got by buying the StepStone compiler have saved me months of work. The latter is particularly good stuff. I like the Collection classes and IdArray stuff much better than the List and Storage classes that come with NS, personally. For a nominal fee I've saved myself months and months of coding. They literally "plugged" into my application, and have served as role models for my own classes. The hype is true. It really does save time and money. - g