It's been around 6 weeks now since I started writing the Cocoa implementation of EiffelVision. Many people told me that they are interested in the port and I'd like to give you a quick update.

I have touched almost all widgets and many basic things work. The controls show up and are positioned correctly (Much of the layout code has been taken from the windows implementation), buttons can be clicked, trees populated, images drawn, etc...

I also compiled the "EiffelVison2 Demo" application and EiffelStudio. (see Screenshots)

Design & Architecture

Just in case you're wondering how everything works: The whole architecture of the implementation has been split in two parts.

1) For handling the lower-level abstraction there is a cocoa bridge which encapsulates the Objective-C objects. This bridge currently consists of 53 classes and it should handle everything that has to deal with C, e.g. pointers and structs and the Objective-C/Cocoa specific stuff such as Selectors and Delegates. E.g. NSButton is wrapped in NS_BUTTON and it is possible to set its action via set_action (an_action: PROCEDURE [ANY, TUPLE]) instead of using Cocoa's Action/Target pattern.

2) The second part is the implementation of the Vision2 interface which maps a Vision control (or any other vision class) to its cocoa counterpart(s). This can sometimes be pretty straight forward, often it involves working around limitations or a different architecture/approach taken by Cocoa.

As of today the source code of my work can also be found in the official trunk and I will continue to commit my updates there. Feel free to play around with it. Of course I'm happy to hear your feedback and discuss any issues.

Screenshots

The widgets example: buttons, labels, pixmaps, windows, menus, drawing area, spin button, scrollable area, ...

EiffelStudio start dialog: The black areas stem from the fact that the GRID control (and the drawing area) are still very much work in progress.