Automatic porting of WBPro generated windows to Squeak: Some issues

Tansel Ersavas tansel at rase.com
Wed May 13 14:06:27 UTC 1998


I have been playing around with a tool that automatically generates a
Squeak Morphic model and an initMorph method from running WBPro windows
(STE or VS), and so far it seems to work fine for about 60-70% of the
standard stuff. I have encountered some problems that I didn't have time
to investigate further. If there are any quick answers to them that
would save me some time.

1. There seems to be no check boxes in Morphic, but it is not  a big
deal, I translate them to toggles. Is this the best alternative?

2. There are no radio buttons as well. Radio buttons are a little bit
different as they need to be synchronized (i.e. grouped under one morph) 

3. Combo boxes need to be implemented with a list box and a text field,
but it is a bit more complex than that as there are 3 different types of
combo boxes (simple, drop down and drop down list)

Has anybody implemented them or is it worth to implement these as
morphs? Things such as Combo boxes are not available in every system,
however radio buttons are very common

4. What is the best way to convert functionality of GraphPane? (has to
be able to handle very large images(>5000*5000 pixels, should be fast
and should be able to scroll responsively)

5. How do we differentiate the double click from a single click on a
list morph (for that matter, in others as well)?

6. WBPro defines many events per widget (i.e. getContents, clicked, etc)
When doing automatic translation it is inevitably losing some logic as
Morphic event mechanism is different. Any hints on how to handle this
situation?

I haven't been able to investigate these in the new 2.0 much but with a
quick look I couldn't see the immediate answers. Any hints are
appreciated.

Hoping to release it within a week or two if anyone is interested.

Tansel





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