On 6-Apr-07, at 12:01 PM, Aaron Reichow wrote:

> JJ-
>
>>> Get rid of MVC. Replace morphic with something actually
>>> a) designed
>>> b) documented
>>> c) using hardware on most platforms to do fonts and most drawing  
>>> with  vectors instead of pixmaps.
>>
>> Does everyone feel that the MVC/MVP paradym is not a good one?   
>> Dolphin's MVP seemed quite good to me.
>>
>> For some of these things, it might be good to work out a kind of  
>> spec for what is expected for these systems we want upgraded so  
>> that if anyone is looking for a project they can pick it up and  
>> know what the goal is.
>
> I know that your response might not be to what Tim meant, but just  
> a response/question in general, but in the case it isn't- he isn't  
> talking about killing off the MVC paradigm.

You're quite right. I happen to think that splitting the UI/app up  
along model-view-controller lines is a brilliant innovation that is  
still brilliant and still barely used. However, the current  
implementation within Squeak is simply wasting space and causing  
confusing code.
>
> even slower machines (PDAs, 133 MHz (?) PCs/Macs) can handle  
> Morphic decently.
Wellllll..... I'd have to dispute that somewhat. My 600MHz RISC OS  
machine (same cpu as many PDAs) really doesn't do to well with  
Morphic. Now morphic is a fine idea in a lot of ways but substantial  
chunks of the implementation simply blow chunks. Part of the problem  
is that old issue of lack of doc leading to people abusing the  
classes and then that bad code getting enthroned as an example to  
later unfortunates. Tweak has some nice ideas too, but to be honest  
it's been driving us nuts a lot of the time over in SophieLand.  
Debugging..... aargh!

>
> MVC is a very fast performer, but limited compared to Morphic,  
> Tweak, or other GUI toolkits (GTK+, Qt, Tk) in a lot of ways.  But  
> you can run it on a 33 MHz machine and it performs just fine. :)
Hey, the Active Book was a 4MHz ARM2 with no cache (really - none at  
all, not even instruction prefetch) and 1Mb ram *total* and the MVC  
UI on that was wonderfully fast and responsive. Menus typically  
opened in less than one frame cycle - ie instantly in user terms.

What we would really benefit from is a well engineered UI package  
that gets back to that sort of performance, has clear intelligible  
code, decent documentation and pink ponies.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
We can rescue a hostage or bankrupt a system. Now, what would you  
like us to do?