2015-03-23 20:54 GMT+01:00 Aliaksei Syrel <alex.syrel@gmail.com>:

Hi,

Sorry if my reply will be too long, but I tried to summarise our experience with Morphic/Brick and give some useful feedback or even provide ideas. Who wants will read :)

Hi,

thank you, this is a really great source of information, and it would be heplful

to have this kind of write up somewhere else (not in the mailinglist).

But I did not question why we may need brick or why it is done.

My question was, what are the feature plans, is it just an experiment that

can vanish, so it is better to not use it for the core tools. Or is it meant to be

THE new framework we should gain our focus on.

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Brick is not a thin layer anymore.
It depends on what you mean under 'a thin layer' ;) Anyway, Brick was born out of need. Spotter is completely built using Brick and Rubric.

This is something I don't understand. As we integrated GT-Tools into the image, Rubric

slipped in as it is need by GT. I asked what is the background, what are the feature plans

and complained about the undocumented core classes, that makes it difficult to see

what changed compared to the old text classes. Alain said he doesn't plan to do further

work on Rubric.
So, WHY don't we replace and migrate the existing classes now and clean it up. It takes so

much resources to maintain both. Every theme change, every change on shortcuts/menus/keymapping, the athens drawing, all has to be double checked - It is so exhausting.

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No morphs are used at all (except Rubric of course).

Well, all Bricks ARE morphs, they share the same state and api.

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All Bricks in Spotter in the end are subclasses of GLMBrick, which uses from original Morph only Canvas (without drawing) and MorphicEvents.

If so, the clean/better way would be to extract those part into a "ProtoMorph" or a "PlainMorph".

and subclass from that once for Brick and again for Morphs.

Now we have Bricks, that are looking like a Morph, but aren't used to be one, and probable doesn't even work if they are used as Morphs.
(Sure this is true for other Morphsubclasses as well, but that does not means it doesn't hurt if we do more of this).

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Everything else was rewritten from scratch. During some period of time Brick was able to render itself on Athens canvas, but we dropped it because of Font issues in athens.

There are even more issues for Athens, and they don't vanish magically. There are some issues

on fogbugz just waiting for some feedback, preferable from people intending to use Athens.

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Spotter is not the only tool written using Brick, GLMPager - a pane pager in GT-Inspector, GT-Playground and GT-Debugger is also completely done using Brick. Almost all tab labels and tab selector in GT tools are Bricks.

...
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We really would like to move all tools to Bloc as soon as possible, but we just need something right now that works and can be used in current version.

But wyh not waiting on Bloc or (even better) help finishing Bloc. Why it is needed to push

this into the release.

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��I think we will never (but who knows) announce Brick as separate project. In our minds it is just useful helper library.

For me, this just disqualifies Brick from being used in the core image.

I see that many things in the GToolkit are better than the old one (theming/layouting/delegate behavior in sub(classes/bricks). Great, it makes fun to work with it,extending the inspector or Spotter search.

But I don't understand why this is pushed that way and on top of the old system/classes instead of cleaning that up.

nicolai

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Thanks for reading :)

Cheers,
Alex