Dear Julian,
    I believe the VW, VA and Dolphin versions are close as regards the 
model layer.  VW has made some low-level changes to support namespaces.  
In the past, VW and VA also used the same UI, thanks to a porting layer 
provided by John, but they are moving apart;  however the custom 
refactoring project has maintained compatibility between its VA and VW3 
versions until now (but are expecting to drop this).  Dolphin simply 
connected the model-layer RB to their existing browser.  (Joseph Pelrine 
et al provided the same to VA in addition to the separate RB UI.)

Whoever ported the Squeak RB took a mix of approaches, with shortcuts in 
the BrowserEnvironment hierarchy that I've always wanted to fix.  I've 
never made the time, or recruited a Squeaker to port the custom 
refactoring add-ons to Squeak and in the process make the fixes.

FYI, at the moment, the project is both integrating custom refactoring 
ideas bit by bit into either mainstream VW or compatible goodies (some 
are in 7.7, more will be in 7.8) and backporting some VW corrections to 
the main stream of custom refactoring.

For the model-layer, Grease is probably little needed - may simplify one 
or two things.

          Yours faithfully
             Niall Ross

Julian Fitzell wrote:

>On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>  
>
>>>+ I'd really love to see a single RefactoringBrowser package that
>>>could be loaded on all the platforms using Grease. I have no idea if
>>>there's any chance of buy-in from the vendors on that one; maybe it
>>>would need a new class name prefix so it could be loaded in
>>>parallel...
>>>      
>>>
>>The various packages are all derived from the same one originally.  They
>>have different GUis, and often have to interface to the system differently
>>because different versions of Smalltalk have different APIs for classes and
>>methods.  Does Grease provide an API for classes and methods?  Does it have
>>a GUI?  Other than that, they will differ only because people have added
>>features to one version and not to the other.  So, which version did you
>>want to use?
>>    
>>
>
>I know, but they've essentially forked over the years. They may have
>been one package once but they certainly aren't now and because of
>that they continue to diverge. It may be that Grease isn't needed at
>all - I don't know because I haven't dug into it. If all the current
>functionality can be done with only ANSI APIs, then great. And no,
>obviously the UI will continue to be different between platforms. Just
>like Seaside, it's fine to have platform-specific subpackages but the
>core should be loadable (ie. it would be nice if it was) on all
>platforms.
>
>Julian
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