[UI] Morphic restructuring

[Alain Plantec]

On Saturday 23 February 2008 18:30, Gary Chambers wrote:
> Once we have a nice performant and flexible framework I see the roles being
> reversed, Morphic being handled via an adaptor in the new framework...
>
> All thoughts welcome.
> Gary.


Hi Gary,
Maybe this is (at least partly) what I'm working on with Miro.
Here is what I said about it on squeak-dev 2 weeks ago as a answer to Hilaire

> On Tuesday 12 February 2008 13:49, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
> > Regarding the recent posts on Morph. I just want to write I am very
> > interested by what Juan is doing with Morph 3, and also about Alain
> > Plantec work to improve Morph.
> > ....
>
> Thanks Hilaire,
> Miro is in very early stage and I did'nt want to say to much about it
> before I can show something to the community.
> but I can say a little bit more. The aim is to provide a set of
> re-targetable widgets. By re-targetable, I mean that it would be possible
> to use them with Morphic2, Morphic3, or SqueakGtk or another connectable
> viewing framework. For now, I'm using a fork of 4 morph classes (Morph,
> ImageMorph, TextMorph and TransformMorph). My widgets are build by
> composition of these 4 morph classes (no inheritance but only real
> composition). Each widget is connected to its view classe (like my 4 Morph
> classes are) by a mediator called a Director. A director have the
> responsibility to build the scene (compose Morphs), to dress the scene
> (style and theme handling) and to manage communications between the scenes
> and the widgets.
> Communications between the scene and the director and the widgets and
> finally the client GUI is made with the help of Announcement framework.
> So I think this architecture can be powerful but it has a cost and I want
> to experiment it before I claim I have something interesting.
> From my point of view, Morphic3 is a very interesting project because it
> aims to provide a minimal set of very clean Morph classes. This is exactly
> what I'm looking for as a built-in viewing framework.
> A first demonstration of Miro usability will be obtained when I will be
> able to really transparently re-target the same client GUI from Morphic2
> compatible classes to Morphic3. The next big step will be to connect Miro
> to SqueakGtk. I will really be satisfied when I will be able to bring
> native widgets connection to squeak.
> As soon as I have a minimal set of clean widget connected to Morphic2
> compatible view classes, I document it and expose it to the community in
> order to receive some feedbacks.
> A long way to go but funny :)
> cheers
> alain
>