I have the same concern, but I decided to throw out caution and perform an experiment. My approach is this: I'm building my app in the trunk image. If Morphic work in the trunk breaks my app, I'm going to just fix it. Since there really isn't a clear roadmap, I'm going to have to deal with breakage.
I think there are some conflicting goals around Morphic that the community still needs to suss out. On Monday, August 31, 2009, Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org wrote:
Hi John,
JohnReed Maffeo wrote:
Hello,
It has been awhile since I have written, but I am back trying to continue work on an application that has been on hiatus for awhile.
Nice to see you around again.
My current goal is to write a graphical interface to display geo-referenced data in a scrollable/zoomable window. I have written code to read data from a file and use it to create an instance of GraphicSymbol. I can display the object on a form and display the form. Now I want to start building a simple map browser application, but I don't know where to start. From what I understand, there is a lot of Morphic that will/should be deprecated. What can I do to ensure that my design conforms to the appropriate Morphic roadmap?
There isn't single and clear Morphic roadmap. From the discussions in squeak-dev about one or 2 months ago, it seems that most people believe that the current Morphic+Etoys API is a central part of Squeak. So, I don't expect any major changes there, although there is some progress in using ToolBuilder to make tools independent of the UI framework. If the Toolbuilder offers what you need, it looks like a good option. Then you have the Pharo fork. If you plan to use it, you'd check with them. You can also use Cuis, my Squeak fork. In Cuis, Morphic is greatly reduced, making everything much easier to understand. Finally, you have my Morphic 3 project, that would help you do a high-quality zoomeable UI. Unfortunately, I've been devoting all my time to Cuis and paid work lately, so I'm not working much on Morphic 3 right now.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. The vision is to create a virtual landscape from a combination of elevation data ie a matrix of elevation points and planar features ie various lines that identify roads, rivers, boundaries etc.
Thanks,
John-Reed Maffeo
Oh! May be you need 3D... The I would suggest taking a close look at Croquet and Cobalt.
Cheers, Juan Vuletich