[UI] Well, shall we do something then?

[Todd Blanchard]

On Sep 16, 2007, at 7:50 AM, Bill Schwab wrote:
> Anyone looking for another reason to at least have a
> layer on top of Morphic might consider that Morphic is going to get
> clobbered (has already been?) in Croquet.  I am not happy about their
> reasoning and suspect they will eventually regret the decision;  
> Morphic
> could easily suffer for it.

Maybe so.  Tweak has a lot of issues of its own IMHO.  The division  
of responsibilities between costume and player is not well understood  
by most (I haven't found a good explanation anywhere anyhow) and  
because of this - most external contributions will likely end up  
bastardized - similar to what happened to Morphic with etoys.

> Morphic is certainly not all bad, and in a rewrite scenario, we should
> be able to clone (aka steal<g>) quite a lot of code from it, clearly
> classifying behavior as belonging to views, interactors (e.g. mouse
> tracking) and presenters.  A lot of cruft will be left behind.

The main problem with trying to ditch Morphic is that you'll end up  
rewriting all the tools yet again.  At least that was my experience  
with I was experimenting with Bricks.  Perhaps ToolBuilder has  
eliminated that problem. Conclusions I reached were:

1) The graphics model lacks sufficient abstraction for what I was  
trying to do - too pixel oriented and a vector model is really  
needed.  No abstraction for "shapes" available.
2) Morphic's event delivery model is just weird and difficult to  
alter because of a lot of special case code for handling halos.

-Todd

>
> Bill
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
> University of Florida
> Department of Anesthesiology
> PO Box 100254
> Gainesville, FL 32610-0254
>
> Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
> Tel: (352) 846-1285
> FAX: (352) 392-7029
>
>>>> jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com 09/16/07 8:25 AM >>>
> On 9/15/07, Brad Fuller <bradallenfuller at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Warning: I know NOTHING about Dolphin. I haven't even seen it.  
>> But, as
> you
>> explain it, it seems like some extra steps to make MVP objects
> interactive.
>> Morphic objects are by default interactive, with nothing to do to get
> there.
>> Why would you want a system that makes you perform extra steps?
>
> Because close coupling (and I'm assuming based on what I've read that
> Morphic is closely coupled to the models) makes a less flexable
> system.
>
> The way I personally program any GUI, web or otherwise, is I make my
> model classes.  These are classes that only understand the work to be
> done. They know nothing about "does someone need to confirm this?" or
> what order their instance variables might be displayed or anything.
> You could call these classes in a background process that has no GUI
> components at all.
>
> Now, there will be lots of different ways of displaying these model
> classes and exposing the services they offer.  It is very often the
> case that different people are going to be interested in different
> services.  So to support this, the best way I have seen is to have a
> "presenter" class that described generically how the class would be
> presented to a "third party" if you will [1].
>
> And even a given presentation may have different ways to view it (see
> Magritte for examples).
>
>> I agree the event processing in Morphic can be improved. And, from my
> small
>> experience with it, there are things that need to be fixed. But, why
> not put
>> energy into improving Morphic? It's already there and MVP seems  
>> like a
> LOT of
>> work!
>
> It will be a lot of work to be sure, but other systems have better
> means of doing GUI work right now then Squeak.  It's time to catch up.
>  And I am still asking and not hearing (probably my own fault): what
> does Morphic offer?  Why bother with the huge clean up it needs?  What
> power/flexability does it offer that other graphic systems don't have?
>
> But as has been mentioned by myself and others already, making MVP has
> nothing to do with Morphic.  Morphic can make a suitable view for the
> MVP framework.
>
> [1] Note that Lukas seemed to arrive at this conclusion independantly
> with his Magritte framework that allows you to describe how a model
> will be presented, and then it can be viewed via the web, Morphic,
> anything that someone has written a "view" for.
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