AW: Squeak and the thing GUI

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Sat Jan 6 23:59:26 UTC 2001


"Hans N. Beck" wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > I know that prof. Smalltalks have full Win32 GUI binding, COM bindung
> > etc. On the other side: Morpic seems interesting, but it's only a
> > thing of squeak, isn't it, not portable ?
> 
> Actually it is portable *exactly* because it does not use the platfrom GUI
> stuff.
> 
> [Hans N. Beck]  Hmmm. That's not clear to me. Two points:
> 1. one can find Morphic only in Squeak environement - so it is not portable over all Smalltalk systems ??

You are using a different definition of "portable" than Bert was.  He was stating that Squeak (and its GUI's) are portable across many OS/hardware platforms, not different Smalltalk variants.  Squeak is ported to more platforms than any other Smalltalk, including Windows, Mac, Linux and various Unixes, BeOS, several PDA's, etc.  So, I'm not sure why you would need to port your code to a different Smalltalk... at least you wouldn't need to in order to gain access to a new OS/hardware platform.

A Squeak GUI built in either MVC or Morphic would be instantly portable accross all of these OS/hardware platforms, because it does not use any native widgets.

On the other hand, if you absolutely had to use native Win32 widgets in your GUI, then Squeak currently does not support this.  But then it is much more difficult to port a Win32 native GUI to another OS platform than it is to port a Squeak GUI.  Computers are generally fast enough these days that non-native GUI's are plenty fast anyway.  Look and feel is another matter, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of Windows look and feel emulation add-on developed by someone for Squeak sometime soon, if that's what you needed.  (Also, I'm currently working on some improved default looks for the standard Squeak Morphic GUI.)

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com





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