I was just reading through the Mac OS X documentation for OpenStep and thinking the very same thing. If morphs knew how to write code to duplicate themselves, perhaps with some parameters (like a model), or to generate code that would openInWorld, perhaps building Support Morphs to facilitate the GUI for project building, but which are "transparent" to the codeWriters (or a repository for special purpose code that gets built into the codeWriters), that might be really neat.
Indeed, it might also might be an order of magnitude "deeper" than a GUI projectbuilder -- you could just refactor the code and, glory be, there's your App.
-----Original Message----- From: MIME :chrisn@Kronos.com > Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 1:27 PM To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu Subject: Generating source code from Morphs [was: RE: More Widgets for Squ eak....]
Hi Lex & Company.
On February 01, 2000, Lex Spoon [lex@cc.gatech.edu] wrote:
"Sort of. Morphic is nice in that you can drag things around > and embed them in each other. Using this facility plus inspectors, you can create an arbitrary window this way. It pretty much has the feel of a > GUI builder, except there is no way to generate code to recreate the thing."
> You know, I have often wished that this mechanism were more > robust, as it is much easier to drag-n-drop widgets together than it is to > wire them up the old fashioned way. Perhaps the top level morph should have a standard selector that can generate a method definition that can later > be used to rebuild the whole thing programmatically. Thus you could hook morphs together, embed them into a SystemWindow or playfield and then ask the SystemWindow to generate code that can reproduce the whole mess... I suppose the first thing to do is to implement Morph>>asSourceCode. Or something like it. > Cheers! > ---==> Chris > > >
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