Renaissance—A Cross-Platform Development Tool for Linux and Mac OS X

Renaissance is a free development framework, licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, used for easily creating portable user interfaces. It allows the developer to create rich user interfaces by using an open, simple and standard format, XML.

When not using Renaissance, Objective-C software developers face the endless task of maintaining the views of their applications for GNUstep with Gorm and for Mac OS X with Interface Builder. As the application evolves and translations are put into place, this can become a major burden, slowing the application development.

Luckily, the Renaissance framework innovates by introducing many new concepts to help developers create portable applications efficiently. Among the innovations, are:

Unfortunately, Renaissance also has some drawbacks. For example, sharing a common user interface on both GNUstep and Mac OS X can lead to human interface guidelines (HIG) violations on both platforms. Moreover, it currently is not possible to use Cocoa-specific classes such as NSDrawer and NSToolbar with Renaissance.

In this article, we use the source code of the TIFF image viewer that was created for my previous article “Programming under GNUstep—An Introduction” [LJ, April 2003, /article/6418]. We replace the view, previously created with Gorm and Interface Builder, with one created in the Renaissance framework. You can download the source code of the application from the SSC FTP site [ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue119/7102.tgz].

In order to compile and install Renaissance under Linux, we first need to make sure GNUstep is installed properly. Using the latest stable release of GNUstep is highly recommended. At the time of this writing, these include GNUstep make 1.9.0, GNUstep base 1.9.0, GNUstep GUI 0.9.1 and GNUstep back 0.9.1. For detailed instructions on installing GNUstep, refer to the GNUstep Build Guide for UNIX Systems (see Resources).

Once GNUstep is compiled and installed, you must load the proper set of environment variables by executing a shell script. Bash users would use:

. /usr/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

and C shell users would do:

. /usr/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.csh

Finally, to compile and install Renaissance, simply uncompress the Renaissance archive file and type (as root):

# cd Renaissance-0.8.0
# make
# make install

Under Apple Mac OS X, you either can install Renaissance from the source or use a precompiled version. To install it from the source, you first must install GNUstep make and then follow the same installation procedure as if you were installing it under GNUstep. Alternatively, you can download the binary version from Renaissance's Web site, uncompress the file and move the resulting Renaissance.framework folder to your /Library/Frameworks/ folder. I personally recommend the latter option.

In the April 2003 GNUstep article, we developed a simple TIFF image viewer. For this application, we had to use Gorm under GNUstep and Interface Builder under OS X to build the user interface. Luckily, Renaissance's portability strengths can help us solve this burden. As our previous application uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, we easily can redo the view using Renaissance, as it already is well separated from the model and the controller.

The first step in redoing the view for our small application is to create the main gsmarkup file. A gsmarkup (short for GNUstep Renaissance Markup Language) file is a simple XML representation of how user interface elements should be created and how they should be placed on screen and connected with one another or other objects in the main application. For our application, the main gsmarkup file represents the view to be shared on both GNUstep and Mac OS X. To create it, open your favorite editor and create the TiffViewer.gsmarkup file containing the content shown in Listing 1.