My PowerBook died

After fighting with the installation of GNUstep, and just before the national summit of combinatorics in Hermosillo, Sonora, my old Power Book suicide by dropping itself from my bed to the floor...
Since I had to give a talk during the summit, I'd run to the shop and bought a new Intel 2.4 MacBook. While reinstalling everything in it, I received a nice link in the EOF mail-list at omnigroup: GNUstepWeb.
A nice installer with compiled binaries for Tiger and Leopard can be found there at the time, and after an easy install procedure, an Xcode template for a web-app can be found by the new-project wizard... however I tried the link today but, either the server is down, or the page disappear, or something went wrong... so I decided to share the Leopard version in my public folder: MyGNUstepWeb.
The next step is to code a Sybase adaptor...

no GDL2 on macports

I was able to install all dependencies of GDL2, but GDL2 it self... macports was unable to load it from nowhere...
also, I'd try to run an app from gnustep (Grom to be precise) and it simply did not started...

...all this GNUstep thing was driving me crazy, so I went to my office at ENSA and start all over, but in my Tiger Server (10.4.11)... there the history was completely different: instead of using macports, I downloaded directly from GNUstep ftp server gnustep-make, gnustep-base and gnustep-dl2, apply a couple of patches provided by Adam Fedor (Mil Gracias ;^) and now GDL2 is installed...

NeXT Step: learn how to integrate it with Cocoa...

gcc42 done...

Finally, I got the desired:
---> Staging gcc42 into destroot
---> Installing gcc42 @4.2.4_1+darwin_7
---> Activating gcc42 @4.2.4_1+darwin_7
---> Cleaning gcc42
Fermat:/opt/local/var/macports sa$

In the meanwhile I found the following comment on the web:
>> ---> Building gcc42 with target all
>>
>> So all is going well until this line showed up and is taking absolute
>> age....what should I do? should I terminate it and try again?
>
> gcc42 takes about 6 hours to compile on a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4, so
> on your 1 GHZ PowerBook G4 I would expect it to take about 9 hours.
> You should also have at least 3GB of free hard drive space.
So, in my 400 MHz PowerBook G3 I supposed it will take forever... but it took just a finite amount of time!

Today I will try to end the installation of GDL2...

GNUstep DL2

At the same time I am trying ARJDatabase in the office, I am trying to install GNUstep-DL2 into my PowerBook; however, several errors had occurred —I wonder why all these open projects are so difficult to make...

One needed step is to install gcc42 (I am using macports for that) but it hangs, for hours, while it displays

--->  Building gcc42

... so far, I'd just found the following comment which encourages me to wait until tomorrow before killing the cc1 process running behind the scene...
(a ticket of macports)

OpenSource EOF

So long without writing here... but this nightmare took me too much of my time...
In the meantime I had been learning and applying the so called DNA Computing; interesting , but not the aim of these lines.

I found an open implementation of Apple's Objective-C EOF in SourceForge.net... it includes source for an EOModeler, for some Adaptors, and for the frameworks EOAccess and EOControl. Even I am missing the EOInterface layer, that may be replaced with Cocoa Bindings... hopefully!

Copyright ®

Just for the record:

I always forget how to change the classic __My Company__ to my company's name... here is how!

In the file

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Xcode.plist

add the following property:

PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions   Dictionary
   ORGANIZATIONNAME   String  Business Applied C Objects

First things first

In order to communicate with an EOEditingContext through a web service, the first step is to create a Java object to wrap it, say BAEditingContext.java. Mine, looks like:

public class BAEditingContext {
   public EOEditingContext eoec;
   public BAEditingContext() {
      super();
      eoec = new EOEditingContext();
   }
   public String test(){
      return eoec.toString();
   }
}

We can check that initialisation was correct through the test method (recall how to publish a method in Consuming Calculator): add a line of the form

NSLog(@"eoec = %@",[BAEditingContextService test]);

and you will receive in your console something like

... eoec = com.webobjects.eocontrol.EOEditingContext@998537

The question now is: how to consume Enterprise Objects?
as serialised objects?
as dictionaries?

Let us see how does EOCustomObject traverses the service...

Cannot publish an EOEditingContext

While publishing, trough a WebService, an EOEditingContext (or a "son" of it), and trying to get the description of the service via

Szamitogep# /Developer/Tools/WSMakeStubs
   -x ObjC
   -name BAEditingContext
   -url  http://192.168.1.8:51123/cgi-bin/WebObjects/
      EditingContextService.woa/ws/BAEditingContext?wsdl

I got the following error:
- The class java.lang.Class is defined in a java or javax package and cannot be converted into an xml schema type. An xml schema anyType will be used to define this class in the wsdl file.
- The class com.webobjects.eocontrol.EOKeyValueUnarchiver does not contain a default constructor, which is a requirement for a bean class. The class cannot be converted into an xml schema type...
- The class java.lang.Number is defined in a java or javax package and cannot be converted into an xml schema type...
- The class com.webobjects.foundation.NSNotification does not contain a default constructor, which is a requirement for a bean class. The class cannot be converted into an xml schema type...
- The class java.lang.Throwable is defined in a java or javax package and cannot be converted into an xml schema type...
...

(o sea de que como quien dice)
¡NOT GOOD!

Let us try by wrapping it...

So far, no good solution

Long time with out writing... but I had not found nothing, good enough, to bring back EOF to the Desktop.
Andrew Lindesay claims that he is developping his own JSON-RPC to this end, but I had not found it easy to use, and, to be honest, I am not sure it is "the right way"; but, if you want to give it a try, go to lindesay.co.nz.

The main obstruction, so far, to substitute Cocoa EOF with WO Services has been that I had not found how to publish an EOEditingContext easily... let us try again...