Developing Business Applications with OpenStep TM [Paperback]

Nik Gervae (Author), Peter Clark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 1996 | ISBN-10: 038794852X | ISBN-13: 978-0387948522 | Edition: 1

OpenStep is the software development environment co-developed by Sun and Next Computers. This book provides the first introduction to OpenStep and how it is used to build business applications for Next, Sun, and Windows NT systems. As well as covering the basics, it covers WebObjects (for developing world wide web applications) and the Enterprise Objects framework for developing database applications. No serious OpenStep developer will want to be without this book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 289 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (December 13, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038794852X
• ISBN-13: 978-0387948522
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,131,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting addition to Cocoa/GNUstep programmers library, December 10, 2009

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A Reader (St. Peters, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Developing Business Applications with OpenStep TM (Paperback)

This book is interesting from a historical perspective, because it is one of the last books about OpenStep/NEXTstep before it became Cocoa subsequent to Next being bought by Apple. Of course, we all know that Mac OS X and iPhone are powered by Cocoa. This is a pretty good intro to Objective-C and also contains information about implementations by Next and Sun. Sun abandoned OpenStep to devote attention to Java.

I bought the book because I wanted to learn to do Objective-C with GNUstep under Linux, and there is no book devoted to that subject. The GNU counterparts to Project Builder and Interface Builder are called Project Center and Gorm. For that purpose the book is not bad (but not great either). It does cover the basics of the language and has a complete example application in three different versions, one with distributed objects and one with enterprise objects.

Unfortunately, because the book focuses on "business applications" and since it seems the authors believe such applications typically don't focus on graphics, they completely ignore the drawing and graphics features of OpenStep. I think that their assumption shows a lack of imagination. Worse, the book has long sections which become very boring to read. For example, Chapter 4 on the Application Kit doesn't have any examples. You have to wait until Chapter 7 before you get to write your first application and they try to teach too many concepts with that one application. When learning a new language and development environment, it is pretty standard to start with something very very simple (like a hello world application) so you can get to know the compiler and tools first.

Because the book is not comprehensive, it is not suitable as a basic reference. To fill in some of the gaps, I am thinking of also getting Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide by Simson Garfinkel (2002) which is an updated version of his earlier book, NeXTSTEP Programming: STEP ONE: Object-Oriented Applications (1993). Also, the Cocoa book by Aaron Hillegass looks to be very good. There are also some on-line resources, but the ones specific to GNUstep are not so great.