[UI] Summary

[Vassili Bykov]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Michael Davies
<mykdavies+squeak at gmail.com> wrote:
>  It might also be worth finding out some more about Gilad Bracha's work
>  on Newspeak. He's got a very slick interface built on top of Squeak,
>  using two frameworks - "Brazil" widget framework and "Hopscotch"
>  application framework. He discussed them briefly in passing during the
>  talk linked to at
>  http://news.squeak.org/2008/04/19/video-of-newspeak-lecture-now-available/
>  - I think he's still working to persuade the sponsors to allow the
>  code to be open-sourced, but there may be a useful discussion to be
>  had in the meantime.

I'll be happy to de-lurk and tell more Brazil and Hopscotch. What
would you like to find out? I'll give a talk specifically about those
frameworks at Smalltalk Solutions this June and possibly elsewhere
sometime later.

But to have the expectations right from the start--you have to realize
that Brazil and Hopscotch are frameworks for and in Newspeak. Squeak
is a host at the moment and Morphic is treated by Brazil as one of the
native UIs it maps to, but you can't just transplant the frameworks
into a Squeak image. Also, while Squeak is a host at the moment, it
does not have to stay this way forever.

At the moment, interoperability between the two languages is possible,
but it is not a goal in itself. A plain Squeak program in the same
image could build a Brazil UI. Hopscoth, on the other hand, is
definitely best used in Newspeak. I expect that after my next redesign
it will become even more Newspeak-specific. That is to say, I myself
am not sure how directly useful both are for the future of Squeak UI.
(And then if you ask me, I don't think that the biggest problem with
the Squeak UI is dearth of UI frameworks, much as I believe that
Brazil and Hopscotch are The Right Thing :).

Cheers,

--Vassili