trainoff@sbphy.ucsb.edu (04/29/89)
We have had our NeXT machines for a couple of weeks now and have gotten past the "play with the neat tools" and "give demos to interested parties" stages. I am trying to develop some new applications for my research group. The problem is that I am very new to Objective C and would appreciate some guidance from the net gurus. Here is the first task. We have a of software that we have written for use on PC's. By in large, they follow a simple C program structure of: get parameters from user via scanf's do math crunching call a device indep graphics package to display results repeat as desired. Now most of the people in my research group are not going to take the time to learn Objective-C or the Interface Builder in the near future so I decided to help them make the transition by making a tool would give them the same minimal functionality as the tools they are familiar with. In particular I want to make an application that fires up a window that looks like a Shell tool for the prompts, and fires up a window with the graphics output. The graphics driver would be rewritten in DPS. The idea is that old style programs that used the device independent graphics routines, would run with only trivial changes. My first inclination was to use the IB to make a custom view that implements the device independent library and to make a library of C calls to hide the messaging syntax (remember, no one else is willing to learn Objective C). Then I was going to run this from a Shell tool and let everyone use the good old scanf syntax to get their data from the keyboard. Admittedly this is very ugly, but it is supposed to be a quick fix. Unfortunately the scanf's break the event handling loop so I lose all of the windowing functionality. This is very bad. Anyway, I am very convinced that this is the wrong way to go about the problem, but.... (and here comes the big question) What is a good way to do this??? Thanks in advance... ..Steve ** ________ ** "...Steve" is a registered trademark of the Trainoff Corporation ________