GNUstep Getting Started

Objective-C popularity aggressively increased based on TIOBE Index (for October 2009)

The reason is simple -- iPhone and all related stuff. We should be ready to develop Objective-C based application in future. The worst thing I don't have a Mac, so I don't have development environment.
I need to get basic Objective-C knowledge, and here several solutions:

• buy Mac
• install Hackintosh on PC
• try GNU compiler and play with Objective-C

The better choice is the last one (for me). As I'm a Windows XP user and I don't have a time to set up Linux, I'm going to use some Windows GNU GCC port: Cygwin or MinGW.
There are two cross-platform projects which implements Objective-C Cocoa/OpenStep APIs:

• The Cocotron -- this project uses Mac machine for build (I didn't dig into this), but built application can be run on Windows.
•  GNUstep -- this project supports many platforms (Windows included).

My choice is

Here is the useful links for quick start:

• www.gnustep.org -- official site
• GNUstep programming mini tutorials -- the second place you should start with.
  
• www.gnustep.it -- This site is dedicated to GNUstep. There are a lot of useful info. 
• GNUstep Application Project -- The purpose of this project is to implement a set of administrative applications and user level applications using GNUstep. Another aim of this project is to port as many applications from OPENSTEP/Cocoa to GNUstep as possible. Great place to look into real application.
• Objective-C: Links, Resources, Stuff -- dig deeper in Objective-C culture
• GNUstep Library -- additional info: Build Guides, User Documentation, Developer Documentation
• GNUstep forum -- it covers the next categories: General, Help, Dev, Webmasters, Bugs, Announce, Apps
• GNUstep HelpCenter -- links to various tutorials and articles on GNUstep.
• GNUstepWiki -- just wiki

How to build your first GNUstep application in Windows?
In general it's simple, but if you have some troubles with it here is the links:

1. Installing and using GNUstep and Objective-C on Windows
   
2. Writing GNUstep Makefiles (I highly recommend it)
3. Compile Objective-C Programs Using gcc

The next post will be about tuning the development environment for GNUstep .