Re: Writing a book on Gorm under the GFDL...

[Frederico Muñoz]

Hello,

On 2004-06-15 03:35:02 +0100 Gregory John Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com> 
wrote:

> I am going to start writing some kind of tome to explain the ins and outs of
> using Gorm.  It's obvious that a lot of people are interested in learning how
> to use it, but don't have access to or haven't bought one of the numerous
> references available for Interface Builder.
> 
> I'm taking suggestions as to what to put into it and what the organization of
> it should be.   If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, I would appreciate
> it.   What might be more appreciated is if someone could actually help me to
> write it by doing different chapters of the book.

I have a few suggestions, but first a foreword: some things that I might have 
doubts could stem from my lack of knowledge in OPENSTEP. People that coded the 
UI by handed will have a much greater grasp on things than I because I always 
used Gorm to make the UI's, and since my apps are very simple I never needed to 
know a lot because Gorm apparently defaults sensibly in a number os ways.

Gorm itself is very intuitive to use (again, the fact that I made apps with it 
speaks a lot); I read 2 tutorials that are around the net and I was good to go. 
The thing that I have more doubts in concerns NSOwner and FirstResponder. They 
are the 2 first objects in the Object view and to be honest the only thing I do 
with them is to set the delegate of NSOwner to the Class I create in Gorm. I 
have opened other people's gorm files and saw all kinds of connections between 
NSOwner, the window and the controller. The FirstResponder is a mistery to me, 
all I get by searching is talk about the reply chain, etc. I must add that 
aeruder on #gnustep was kind enough to explain many of this things to me, and 
rburns sent me two examples that were very helpful. Still it might be something 
to put in the book...  I will be doing a Document based application and from 
the examples I saw the FirstResponder will be important there. Most of the 
times things "just work", which is great but leaves me with a sense that 
something is happening that I didn't quite fully grasp. A NSDocument 
application example would be very valuable (something like the one Ludovic 
made, TiffViewer, very nice since it explained the MVC thing... until now I 
basically was creating the class and just adding all the methods in there).

Another good thing would be to describe an application with several gorm files, 
specifically one whose main nib was just the menu and all the other nibs were 
seperated, since it would make it clear how to do it and how to connect things.


To someone without a great experience (or even a small expererience) things 
like NSApp delegate, whose is NSOwner, what to connect to what, etc are 
important. They might be beyond Gorm per se but to use it correctly it's a must.

Hope this helps somewhat, if some of the things I have said are to "basic" 
nevermind those :)

Best Regards,

Frederico Muñoz