Gorm

Gorm stands for "Graphical Object Relationship Modeller" and is GNUstep's easy-to-use interface designer. In the following sections you will learn more about it...

Introduction

Before NeXT Computer Inc. revolutionized software developement with its OpenStep API, a new way of designing graphical user interfaces was already introduced by NeXT at the beginning of the 90s. Its operating system NeXTstep featured Interface Builder, an application that for the first time allowed developers to quickly create nice user interfaces without having to code everything manually. Using drag & drop elements of windows such as buttons, sliders, textfields etc. were created and edited, then linked to functions and variables. Thus, Interface Builder helped developers to focus on the code for the actual functions without having to care about stuff not related to their project goal.

As part of the GNUstep project, Gorm is meant to be the counter part to NeXT's Interface Builder. With Gorm designing tough and complex graphical interfaces for your applications can easy and quickly be done using drag & drop, powerful inspectors and teamwork with ProjectCenter.

Gorm allows developers to quickly create and edit graphical application interfaces using a whole lot of GUI elements: windows, menus, buttons, labels, sliders, tables, textfields, browsers, images, altert panels and more. Custom palettes can be dynamically loaded to add additional elements or functionality.

Designing a simple Text Editor with Gorm

After creating the interface, objects can be linked using mouse operations. Also Gorm features interactive testing of interfaces.

State

Currently Gorm gets extended with new elements and inspectors to get every common GUI object included in the standard palettes. Doing this is relatively easy now as all the inspectors are now created using Gorm itself.

Documentation

For installation help, please refer to the INSTALL file included in the Gorm package or the GNUstep Build Guide.

The Documentation folder of the Gorm package contains more information on how to use Gorm.

The Manual is also available here and on the wiki for your convenience.

Download Gorm

The latest version of Gorm (v1.1.0, released Aug 29 '06) can be download here.

Please Note

The recently added NIB compatibility is for 10.2.x and later nibs. Older typed stream nibs will need to be converted to 10.2.x nibs for use in Gorm. Older nibs will contain objects.nib, while newer ones will have keyedobjects.nib. If you have access to a Mac, the you can convert them. Please load them into InterfaceBuilder and save them again and they should convert.

Maintainer

The current maintainer of Gorm is

Gregory Casamento (greg_casamento at yahoo dot com)