Re: Soliciting Thoughts on the new NSController

[Stefan Urbanek]

On 2003-10-29 09:25:41 +0100 Philippe C.D. Robert <philippe.robert@gmx.net> 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 12:58  Uhr, Alex Perez wrote:
> > All,
> > As you may or may not be aware, Apple, as part of their 10.3 release, has
> > implemented a new class, called NSController. I'm not asking that this be
> > implemented in GNUstep. I'm just looking for people's comments on it,
> > from the GNUstep point of view. For a brief synopsis of NSController, see
> > http://www.livejournal.com/users/chanson/67915.html . Aaron Hillegas has
> > criticized Apple's implementation of it rather strongly, see
> > http://lists.apple.com/mhonarc/cocoa-dev/msg10603.html (archives/archives)
> > for this post.
>
> Is there some documentation available on the net already? I could not find it 
> on the Cocoa pages.

AppKit:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/ObjC_classic/index.html

and Foundation:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/ObjC_classic/index.html

There are the new classes. My choice :-) :

- NSValueTransformer
- NSStream, NSInputStream and NSOutputStream.

Definitely, KeyValue observing is one of the most interesting additions to the 
Foundation:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/KeyValueObserving/index.html

Choice of new stuff from the AppKit:

- NSSpeechRecognizer
- NSSpeechSynthesizer (we can have this one very easily, just by doing few 
modifications to the Ian_J's Speech Service)

> BTW there are other additions to 10.3 it seems, eg. NSXMLParser which 
> provides SAX-based XML-document parsing, or NSValueTransformer, NSStream, 
> NSInputStream, NSOutputStream and maybe others.

All those clases deserve at least a brief look :-)

Concerning the new NSController, from what I have read look quite useable, if 
used properely. If we really had NSController support in Gorm, for example, we 
can have the fastest opensource prototype builder :-) And that would be the 
killer app. Remember, that 'programming with mouse' is considered a 'bad thing' 
only because all other development environments sucks.

NSController needs a bit of time to be properely evaluated. It is too early to 
judge it's usefulness. However, it fits well to the MVC paradigm. If there are 
NSControllers for common functionalities of apps that can be reused in some 
form, then it can save some development time.

> Good to see that Apple uses ObjC rather than anything else for new features 
> and additions! :-)

I agree. What I like most, that they are really innovating and creating new 
classes (like SpeechSythetiser or different view on Stream classes), not 
another kinds super-hashed dictionaries or useless twentieth variant of 
combo-boxes.

One way or the other, if we want some of the functionality or not, it is worth 
to look at the changes, just to get inspired.

Stefan