Advice request from newbie
Advice request from newbie
- Subject: Advice request from newbie
- From: Andrea Perego <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 18:22:03 +0200
Hi,
I'm just starting to learn Cocoa, with no previous experience in OOP
(but for some Java tutorial). My goal would be to port a rather large
application I developed some years ago (better said, I've been
developing since....;-> )
using MPW and C. I'd prefer a Cocoa porting rather than a plain
"carbonization" since:
- the application relies on rather older APIs and I should work a lot just
to upgrade it to the level where carbonization may begin.
- I'm rather bored of spending 80%+ of my programming time just for the GUI.
My concerns lie in the fact that this application deals with its data in a way
that does not conform to the standard "document" paradigm:
- its main purpose is to perform analysis of nuclear spectra, i.e. histograms
of, typically, 4096-8192 channels.
- in many cases, the output data are just the result of some
calculation, and may be stored as plain text files. Sometimes,
however, new spectra are created
by manipulating existing ones, and must be archived on disk.
- the spectra are stored on disk in files that contain many of them.
Each file has a fixed-size header with a "jump table" to the
individual, sequentially stored, spectra. Presently, the routines to
load-store spectra
walk through this internal file structure, reading and writing at the
proper file offsets.
- during the process of selecting the spectra to be read, the user
has access to some info pertaining to each spectrum (e.g. read from
the spectra file) before
making her/his choice.
These peculiarities (and my lack of Cocoa experience!) make me dubious about
embracing the standard Cocoa model for document driven applications, with due
subclassing, or skipping it altogether. Of course, a rather easy way
(?) would be to equate: a spectra file <-> a Cocoa document, but I
don't find the solution appealing, because the application should
read/write/keep in [virtual] memory a large amount of unused data.
After all, I've started programming in the early '70, when 32Kbytes
were a dream, and economy has become a second nature...
Therefore, I'd like the opinion of some more expert member of the
Cocoa community.
TIA
Andrea Perego
Univ. of Florence - Phys. Dept.