[theolein]

Hi, I'm a beginning java programmer and would like to learn a little about OBjective C as a language. Specifically, are there any tutorials that anyone knows of that guide you through a small application in OSX? Also, I know that Objective C is available on Linux, but are there any major differneces in the implementations of the language on these two platforms, and is it available on Windows at all, what with Microsoft's craziness with the .Net thing? These questions are because it would really be interresting to know if one would be locked to OSX when writing in Objective C or if porting to other platforms remains a possibility.

[maguirer]

Try http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/...coaTopics.html

There are some tutorials and sample code on there.

[Mniot]

I did a quick search and found http://www.stepstn.com/
selling an Obj-C compiler that runs, among other things, on NT and 95.

Obj-C is part of gnu's gcc, which I'd expect to do some Windows compilation. At the very least, you could run the Obj-C code through gcc and turn it into C code, then move that to a C compiler that did windows and finish compiling.

I don't know how useful Obj-C is without Cocoa, though... Especially with C++ being the crowd favorite...

[tea4u]

Obj-c itself is just a small extension to ANSI-C so that there is little, if any, difference between Apple's cc (modified version of gcc) and gcc. In fact, Apple is trying to unify their cc into gcc, probably after gcc 3.0. However, having same compiler specifications does not necessarily mean you can compile your OS X code on the other platforms, let alone running it without porting. This is because OS X applications rely heavily on Apple's class libraries (I'm ignoring Carbon based applications because Carbon is a c++ API). Without them, it's like Java without built-in classes. Specifically, anything that has GUI won't be built. For command line tools and daemons, you may be able to write cross-platform code if you use GNUstep that is a Cocoa clone minus GUI.

This has been a source of complaints from many, many developers since Apple decided not to release YellowBox (later renamed to Cocoa) for Windows. Java, on the other hand, should, at least in theory, allow you to write cross-platform apps with or without GUI if you don't mind appearance of pure Java programs.

BTW, you may want to check out CurrencyConverter at http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/...erTutorial.pdf for Obj-c and http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/...vaTutorial.pdf for Java. They are supposed to be the same applications built with two different APIs. I don't know much about Java so I can't tell how close these two implementations are, but you might find it interesting.

[theolein]

Thanks for all your replies. I even receiveed this one on my hotmail account:

Sorry I am not a member on the MacNN board. Maybe you could post this reply?

See this tutorial, it is EXCELLENT!
http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes/

Should keep you going for awhile. Also I recommend the mailing lists at
OMNIgroup for MacOSX.

David

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[theolein]

Sorry, I forgot to say, that apple was probably put under pressure from ms not to release rhapsody for intel, and I can well imagine that ms used office as a leverge again.

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