Hi folks,

Lately I've been working with Lukas Renggli on a new version of
OmniBrowser. The main focus has been on cleaning up and isolating
platform dependencies so that we can have a single version that works
well on both Squeak and Pharo, while fitting comfortably into each
platform's idioms. That part of it has been quite well.

For proper integration with Squeak, I've been trying to get OB
building its interface using ToolBuilder. It *mostly* works, but there
are some areas where ToolBuilder doesn't provide the functionality
that OmniBrowser needs. I had planned to extend ToolBuilder a bit with
the additional functionality that OB needs, but that turns out to be
more work than I anticipated, and I wasn't able to get it done before
the 4.3 feature freeze. So, given the constraint of working with the
Squeak 4.3 feature set, I'm not quite sure how to proceed.

Here are some of the options:

1) Abandon ToolBuilder and just deal with Morphic directly. This is
what OB has historically done, and I'd just be updating the old
Morphic code to fit better into modern Squeak conventions. There's no
longer any need to have this code work on Pharo, since Lukas is now
using a separate Polymorph-specific widget package on Pharo.

2) Use ToolBuilder where possible, but customize its output. This
misses the point of ToolBuilder, since it means OB won't be able to
work with MVC, but at least it reduces the chance that OB will get
left behind if someone adds a feature to ToolBuilder. It is a bit of
"worst of both worlds" situation.

3) Use ToolBuilder, and just accept that not all the features of OB
will be available until they get added to ToolBuilder. I'm not sure
how much graceful degradation I can acheive, but it might not be too
bad, and it'll give us (me) motivation to improve ToolBuilder for
Squeak 4.4.

4) Have the OB installation process patch the base image to add the
needed functionality. That would be the cleanest in terms of the OB
code, but has the potential to break other packages that users might
want to load.

I'd really like to make this next release a solid toolset for Squeak,
and fix a lot of the little annoyances that cause Squeakers to avoid
it. Lukas' refactoring stuff is really excellent, better than the
VisualWorks refactoring browser IMHO, and I want to make it palatable
to more people in the Squeak community. I'm leaning towards option #1,
because I suspect it's the mostly likely to achieve that, but I
thought I'd put it out there and ask the community for advice. So, how
important is ToolBuilder? What options am I missing?


Cheers,

Colin