ProjectCenter FAQ

General Information

What is ProjectCenter, aka PC?

ProjectCenter is the GNUstep counterpart to NeXT's ProjectBuilder. The project is not finished yet - and won't be for a long time - but is already usable for real world projects. It is designed towards an extendibility and as much as programmer's freedom as possible!

The ProjectCenter will hopefully consist of the following capabilities somewhen in the midterm future:

• Project management

This includes versioning control, automatic makefile generation, file management etc.

• Source code editing facilities

A built-in editor will be available in a future release. This has not main priority, though.

• Debugging facilities

A built-in debugger will be added to ProjectCenter as soon as possible!

• Documentation automation help

Automatic documentation generation using autogsdoc or another tool will be introduced later.

• UML-based case tool

This is very far away from now...

On what architecture does it run?

ProjectCenter runs on all GNUstep based systems. Among them are GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other unices. There are plans to port it to Mac OS X in the midterm future.

Where will it be released?

Sources and documentation are released on the website mentioned below.

Is there a website for ProjectCenter?

Yes, go to ProjectCenter.

Is there a mailing list for ProjectCenter?

No, but you can mail us if you have some questions. Please write the mails to one of the developers or to the GNUstep mailing lists.

What is ProjectCenter's copyright?

ProjectCenter is released under the GNU GPL. More information about this license can be found at the FSF home.

How can I help?

If you have a specific piece of functionality that you would like to contribute, or if you would like to ask for suggestions about what coding work you can do to help, contact the ProjectCenter team!

Development

What languages are supported?

Since ProjectCenter is designed for GNUstep, Objective C is the language of choice. It should also be possible to use it for plain C applications without GNUstep, since the GNU makefile package supports this as well.

For more information about Objective C, see the link section.

What libraries can I use?

GNUstep is the environment for which ProjectCenter is designed. It may work elsewhere, such as under OS X, but this has not been tested.

Do I need the GNUstep makefile package?

Yes, if you want to develop for GNUstep! GNUstep itself, as well as ProjectCenter, is based on this makefile package! You may download it from our download page.

Do I have to install GTK+ or QT to use it?

No. ProjectCenter is based on the much more powerful OpenStep API, specified by NeXT Software Inc. (Now Apple Computer Corp.) and Sun Microsystems.

Can I use a different editor?

Yes, and you should because let's face it, PC's built-in text editor is lacking features many programmers have come to expect in an IDE such as 'syntax highlighting' and 'auto indentation'. After all, PC's focus is to manage a project and not edit source files.

General Strategy

First one must tell PC which command invokes the custom text editor. Navigate to the PC > Info > Preferences Menu. When the window appears, change the pulldown to Miscellaneous. There you'll find the Editor preference, which by default is set to 'ProjectCenter'. Change this value to reflect the location of a custom editor.

Emacs

In short, tell emacs to start a server on startup that allows it to share editing contexts.

• First add the line '(server-start)' to your ~/.emacs file. You may skip this but you'll have to manually issue this command everytime you start emacs. Below is an example of how to do this using the shell.

 echo '(server-start)' >> ~/.emacs

• Launch Emacs. Checking the *messages* buffer should show that the server has started.
• Set the Editor Preference in PC to the location of your `emacsclient` (see General Strategy above) and tell it to not wait around for the buffer to exit.

 /usr/bin/emacsclient -n

• Click a file in PC and it should appear in the buffer in your emacs client.

Again, make sure that emacs is running before you open the file in PC. `emacsclient` doesn't have the ability to create a new emacs server, only connect to an existing one. It's done this way versus using plain old `emacs` to prevent multiple instances of 'foo.h' being open.

Nano

Possible values for Editor in the Preferences window. Be sure to prefix with the location of `nc`.

 nc  --noask

On Debian :

 nedit-nc --noask

The ProjectCenter Team

Who is currently involved in writing code?

• Serg Stoyan is the main author and responsible for the design of ProjectCenter
• Philippe C.D. Robert was the previous author and maintainer
• Adam Fedor contributed Makefile patches
• Pierre-Yves Rivaille contributed the Gorm project type
• Nicola Pero contributed some patches and code cleanup

Who else is currently involved in this project?

• Andrew Lindesay is the creator of many of the great icons
• Philippe C.D. Robert also created some icons