Hi Folks,
A few days ago I released SimpleMorphic for Pharo. SimpleMorphic is the Morphic implementation in Cuis. It is much smaller and simpler than the one in Pharo (and in Squeak). Please see http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2010-November/035302.ht... . A link to the code (for Pharo 1.2) is included.
While this release of the code is for Pharo, it shouldn't be a big deal to make it run on Squeak. My hope is that the Pharo community studies it in detail, adopts it, and eventually remove the old Morphic. For Squeak, maybe the same happens. Or perhaps there would be 2 Morphic UIs for Squeak: FullMorphic+Etoys and SimpleMorphic... So, what do you think?
I also sent this comment to the Pharo mail list recently, trying to make clear why SimpleMorphic is useful:
"Size of 4 core classes (Morph, MorphExtension, PasteUpMorph and WorldState) Pharo / Squeak / Cuis totalIvars: 39 / 46 / 26 totalClassVars: 15 / 10 / 5 totalInstMethods: 1170 / 1764 / 663 totalClassMethods: 55 / 71 / 16
Size of the whole Morph hierarchy Pharo / Squeak / Cuis totalClasses: 197 / 331 / 58 totalIvars: 649 / 1063 / 257 totalClassVars: 54 / 138 / 28 totalInstMethods: 6651 / 9186 / 2115 totalClassMethods: 303 / 858 / 127
SimpleMorphic is much smaller. Core classes are simpler and easier to understand, fix and extend. The most important part is that this is not blind removal of unused code. A lot of the functionality has been redesigned to make it simpler, and the removal was done with great care to result in a consistent system. This work started in 2004, so we're talking of about 6 years of careful work. All this means that SimpleMorphic does not support all the features that Pharo or Squeak might support. Please use the browsers and other tools in Cuis to check what it indeed can do.
Talking about complexity, let's take for example, morph layout. This is started with #doLayoutIn: in Pharo and #doLayoutIfNeeded in SimpleMorphic.
In Pharo, this method calls #adjustLayoutBounds: (19), #layout:in: (149), #layoutProportionallyIn: (10), #computeCellArrangement:in:horizontal:target: (87), #computeGlobalCellArrangement:in:horizontal:wrap:spacing: (31), #computeCellSizes:in:horizontal: (30), #computeExtraSpacing:in:horizontal:target: (136), #layoutLeftToRight:in: (91), #layoutTopToBottom:in: (91), #placeCells:in:horizontal:target: (70). The numbers in parenthesis are the sum of the lines of code of the implementors. Total lines of code for layout (taking only these most important methods) is 714. I doubt there are many people who really understand all of this code.
In SimpleMorphic (Cuis), this calls #layoutSubmorphsIn: (10), #applyLayoutFrameIn: (11), #layout:in: (24). Total lines of code is 45. I believe any smalltalker could understand these in just minutes."
Cheers, Juan Vuletich