[squeak-dev] OmniBrowser and ToolBuilder

Frank Shearar frank.shearar at gmail.com
Sun Nov 20 09:15:06 UTC 2011


On 20 November 2011 08:56, Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com> wrote:
> 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?

What options are missing from ToolBuilder? Is it just a case of
missing specs (+ Morphic backing) for some set of widgets?

I really like ToolBuilder: it lets me see the skeleton of the UI - and
alter it - without the steep Morphic learning curve that's so far put
me off learning it.

frank



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