[Mono-osx] Conceptual Idea: (Semi)automatic generation of Cocoa# wrapper classes

[marc hoffman]

Stefan, Russell,

Thanx for the pointers. Robert (Gieseke) and i are looking into bridgesupport,
with the basic idea being that we should be able to generate entire class
skeletons with stub methods from it (these classes could be partial, so they
could then be extended with properties, events, helper methods, on top of the
auto-gen code). We'll be playing with this over the next few days/weeks.

On first look, it seems that xml files generated by gen_bridge_metadata don't
really have *all* the info (for one thing, all parameter types seem to be
defined as "B" (Boolean?), no ancestry information is given, etc. but this could
be a matter of us not using the tool properly, yet ;). We'll investigate
further.

Unrelated, i will finish the "method converter" tool i posted a teaser
screenshot for earlier this month; this should certainly help with adding
individual method stubs, short term. I'm fighting with some last Cocoa#/Leopard
issues (i'm hoping Geoff will have time to look at those soon ;) as well as with
my own time constraints, but i can probably have something usable i can share,
soonish.

Yours,

marc hoffman

RemObjects Software
The Infrastructure Company
http://www.remobjects.com








> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan Csomor [mailto:csomor at advancedconcepts.ch]
> Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2007 12:17 PM
> To: marc hoffman
> Cc: mono-osx at lists.ximian.com; cocoa-sharp at lists.ximian.com
> Subject: Re: [Mono-osx] Conceptual Idea: (Semi)automatic generation of Cocoa#
> wrapper classes
> 
> Hi
> > Hi,
> >
> > this maybe (probably?) has come up before, but i couldn't find any
> > reference to it, so here it goes:
> >
> > As i've found out myself, recently, creating the wrapper classes needed
> > to access the Cocoa objects from managed code is a very tedious and
> > error prone process, which in tuen explains, of course, why such a small
> > portion of Cocoa is actually exposed, so far. It's mind-numbing
> > runt-work that no-one wants to do
> BridgeSupport on Leopard has information on all APIs that can be used to
> generate bridging code, it is used for PyObjC and RubyCocoa AFAIK but
> I'd suggest takeing a closer look:
> 
> http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/BridgeSupport
> 
> Best,
> 
> Stefan Csomor
>