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eText & NeXTSTEP Long live the `e'! Never say die! Why doesn't eText run on Windows? The eText Engine was built with NeXTSTEP simply because it could not be written with any other commercially deployed application architecture. I'd love to, but I have a finite budget, a finite amount of time-til-graduation, and infintesmally small tolerance for boneheadedness. What Features of NEXTSTEP does eText leverage? Dynamic loading of objects, automagic management of application resources (images, strings)... Don't even start with me about .DLLs... As far as I can tell, the theorists haven't caught up with this one. Inheritance has its limits, protocols break past them... A guaranteed interface, regardless of typing is a powerful organizing principle for large scale systems. Try to extend Oberon's lousy Text object to do this... I dare you! There isn't a better integrated suite of ªclass-libraryº objects, multimedia support, application integration, and cool out there. So much of the system ªjust worksº that I'm absolutely shocked, shocked, that a system like eText could take 25,000 lines of code. Have I told you about the Text class? No? Well, come over here, my pretties... There isn't a finer community of computer users out there... They deserve a tool like this! Isn't there anything in the labs? Research tools, such as the Andrew Toolkit come close, but can't be deployed with the total integration and ease-of-use afforded by NeXSTEP. Of course, with the public release of eText5, it's now a ªresearch systemº... with all of the attendant support and reliability issues... So who else is this crazy? Consider, too, that other ambitious projects are based on NeXTSTEP for similar ªit-just-can't-be-doneº reasons: MediaView.app, the multimedia compound document editor that inspired eText, from Dick Phillips at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Draw++.app, a compound-document extension to Draw.app from Patrick Heynen at Cornell's Program on Computer Graphics. WavesWorld, a interactive 3D modeling system. Geez, those four words do it such poor justice. Take a look at Michael B. Johnson's wizardry for yourself sometime... WW3DWell will be coming soon as a proposed Annotation.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.