FYI: The mail of Colin Putney to the Squeak mailing list regarding the future of OmniBrowser. For Pharo there are also some changes upcoming: The latest GUI takes better advantage of the standard Polymorph widgets and brings resizable column and faster updates. Lukas ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Colin Putney <colin@wiresong.com> Date: 20 November 2011 09:56 Subject: [squeak-dev] OmniBrowser and ToolBuilder To: Squeak-Dev <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org> 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 -- Lukas Renggli www.lukas-renggli.ch