2. History of GNUstep

This chapter gives a brief overview of the history of GNUstep. It's quite developer oriented, so users shouldn't worry too much about this section.

GNUstep is a set of libraries, which are split into two parts: Foundation (gnustep-base) and AppKit (gnustep-gui or "Application Kit"). It is an implementation of the OpenStep standard, which was published by the now defunct software company NeXT, which has since been bought out by Apple Computer, Inc.

The OpenStep standard had these two parts. It also had a definition of a device-independant display system (DPS) which is not used in GNUstep. Foundation provides a set of classes for common low-level computing tasks such as string manipulation, vectorised storage structures such as arrays and dictionaries, file handling, binary data storage and manipulation, cross-platform calendar date and time handling, etc. AppKit provides a set of classes for GUI development, such as the usual controls (buttons, text fields, windows, views, tableviews, etc), some unique controls such as browsers, and support for document based applications, pasteboard services, drag and drop, etc.

GNUstep started out implementing OpenStep soon after it become available to the public, particularly the Foundation part of it, and for a long time was quite incomplete. OpenStep was released as an operating system by NeXT, but since the company went belly-up and was bought by Apple, it's found itself reincarnated in the form of Cocoa, which implements all of the original standard, and has extended it somewhat, particularly by splitting out many classes. GNUstep has tracked most of the changes to Cocoa as they have been added, so much so now that GNUstep stands quite independant and is very different to the original specification.