On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 12:49:17PM -0500, Norton, Chris wrote:
Hi Lex & Company.
On February 01, 2000, Lex Spoon [lex@cc.gatech.edu] wrote:
"Sort of. Morphic is nice in that you can drag things around and embed them in each other. Using this facility plus inspectors, you can create an arbitrary window this way. It pretty much has the feel of a GUI builder, except there is no way to generate code to recreate the thing."
You know, I have often wished that this mechanism were more robust, as it is much easier to drag-n-drop widgets together than it is to wire them up the old fashioned way. Perhaps the top level morph should have a standard selector that can generate a method definition that can later be used to rebuild the whole thing programmatically. Thus you could hook morphs together, embed them into a SystemWindow or playfield and then ask the SystemWindow to generate code that can reproduce the whole mess... I suppose the first thing to do is to implement Morph>>asSourceCode. Or something like it.
I've written something along those lines already. I've got a collection of about 10 morphs that support a common protocol to create source code that recreates the layout. They're also fully pluggable and provide a simple API so that you can use them without having to understand their internals.
I'm in the process of cleaning up the code right now. I was planning on releasing it in a couple of weeks, but if anyone's interested in playing with what I have now, send me email.
--Chris
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org