Well as the discussion was in another thread , Spec is licensed as MIT inside Pharo , the new GPL license seems to affect any present and future contributions from Ben. So I will say yes it looks like Spec is here to stay, I may not be a fan of Spec design but they are many Pharoers out there that they are and since Pharo community is quite democratic looks like Spec is here to stay. The Pharo team wont be able to add in Pharo any GPL affected contributions of Ben ( assuming Ben continuous to develop Spec which I doubt) but Pharoers can continue to contribute to the Pharo MIT Spec . So it looks like the effect is minimum if you exclude the fact we lost the most major contributor to Spec. So far the idea is to push forward both Spec and Morphic and personally I really like this idea as it lets people more options on the GUI front which can be only good thing since anyone this way can use the right tool for his or her own needs. It would also be a lot of shame if Ben's hard work goes to waste even though he decided to give up pharo, we have to respect his choice but also his work make sure his effort don't go wasted as he built a tool that many people find useful. So yes you can keep using Spec and I am sure we will all appreciate any contribution you make to Spec :) On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:15 PM, Martin Saurer <martin.saurer@bluewin.ch> wrote:

Dear all,

A few weeks ago, I read about the dispute on Spec, which has escalated, and as a result of that, Ben has left the Pharo/Smalltalk community. It's always sad when a long term member leaves, but live is going on.

From my (somewhat business minded) point of view one question is currently unanswered: Is there a future of Spec (without Ben)?

I'm asking this because I'm the author of a web frontend engine which can be bound to a programming language (like Pharo) to create desktop-like web applications. Currently there is an implementation for the J programming language as well as a rough (but working) implementation for Pharo. My plans for the (far) future is to bind the frontend engine to Pharo in a more elegant way probably by extending Spec. So one may write a desktop application in Spec, and a corresponding web GUI is automatically created as well.

So I'm currently a little unsure whether to go with Spec or going back to the good old Polymorph.

Is somebody of the core team able to clarify the situation?

Many thanks in advance.

Martin

Hi martin

Dear all,

A few weeks ago, I read about the dispute on Spec, which has escalated, and as a result of that, Ben has left the Pharo/Smalltalk community. It's always sad when a long term member leaves, but live is going on.

Indeed.

From my (somewhat business minded) point of view one question is currently unanswered: Is there a future of Spec (without Ben)?

Yes. Definitively. :) It will move slower but we will. I started to clean Spec double unnecessary interpretation loop Ben was not alone behind Spec. The idea is coming from my experience writing application in VW. Johan also helped. So we do not stress much. Esteban has a new Spec interpreter on hold since a long long time. We cleaned with igor many methods to improve the GC stress when we introduced new version of LayoutFrame. And Esteban always wanted to do a pass on Spec. So we will plan that. If you look we are continuously making sure that the system will evolve nicely. some issues are planned on fogzbugs https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?13888 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?13479 https://pharo.fogbugz.com/default.asp?13851#107599

I'm asking this because I'm the author of a web frontend engine which can be bound to a programming language (like Pharo) to create desktop-like web applications.

Super can you tell us more? Did you look at Phobos?

Currently there is an implementation for the J programming language as well as a rough (but working) implementation for Pharo. My plans for the (far) future is to bind the frontend engine to Pharo in a more elegant way probably by extending Spec. Excellent. We need clients and we will pay attention to you. So one may write a desktop application in Spec, and a corresponding web GUI is automatically created as well.

We want the same for Cocoa Widgets :) Esteban has a first draft of a brigde so we could define our interface in Spec and run the with Mars (the bridge) and get Cocoa widgets.

So I'm currently a little unsure whether to go with Spec or going back to the good old Polymorph.

In fact it depends of your needs. Glenn started to use spec and went directly to morphic because some aspects of widgets are not covered by Spec (we should improve the coverage of the Morph API - color, selection....). Now the API of polymorph is not really good because widget creation api should be widget class and not UITheme. So I started to see how we could improve the situation and the first step is that every widgets with labels should be font parametrized and access a theme. Then the API will be migrated from UI to the widgets. I will restart to work on that after 15 of october (or before if I finish my current proposal writing).

Is somebody of the core team able to clarify the situation?

Let me know if this is ok for you.

Many thanks in advance.

Martin