[Pharo-project] Developing morphic apps with pharo - sorting wheat from chaff
Hi, I'm writing a desktop business application for a customer. Having written a number of web applications using Pharo and Seaside, I would like to use Pharo and Morphic in this case. I have read the section on Morphic in `Pharo by Example', however, writing a business application (i.e. CRUD), I need to focus on (tedious) data browsing and entry, keyboard navigation, and so on as opposed to (cool) interactive morphs. My problem is trying to discern the the current and most stable approach to using Morphic for such an application. Clearly, I have a wealth of code at my fingertips and the Squeak wiki has numerous posts, but many of the latter seem outdated and speak only vaguely of the MVC vs. Morphic situation. Do I use ToolBuilder? Are pluggable morphs a vestige of MVC? Do I use PolyMorph widgets? Do I use dependencies, events, or announcements? I am very interested in seeing Pharo succeed as a business application development tool (among other uses), and I would be quite happy to contribute to code and documentation to help that along. However, first, I need to learn how to sort the wheat of Morphic from the chaff of MVC and whatever else is lying around in a Pharo image. Any pointers to (more) definitive documentation and classes would be much appreciated. Regards, Mike -- Michael J. Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>
Hi Michael, I'm not experienced in professionnal GUI applications with Pharo, but these screencasts may help you: http://pharocasts.blogspot.com/search/label/gui CLFramework (UIBuilder for Pharo) looks promising. See http://www.squeaksource.com/CLFramework.html and http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=uibuilder+pharo&search_type=&aq=... Laurent Laffont On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:47 PM, Michael Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>wrote:
Hi,
I'm writing a desktop business application for a customer. Having written a number of web applications using Pharo and Seaside, I would like to use Pharo and Morphic in this case.
I have read the section on Morphic in `Pharo by Example', however, writing a business application (i.e. CRUD), I need to focus on (tedious) data browsing and entry, keyboard navigation, and so on as opposed to (cool) interactive morphs.
My problem is trying to discern the the current and most stable approach to using Morphic for such an application. Clearly, I have a wealth of code at my fingertips and the Squeak wiki has numerous posts, but many of the latter seem outdated and speak only vaguely of the MVC vs. Morphic situation. Do I use ToolBuilder? Are pluggable morphs a vestige of MVC? Do I use PolyMorph widgets? Do I use dependencies, events, or announcements?
I am very interested in seeing Pharo succeed as a business application development tool (among other uses), and I would be quite happy to contribute to code and documentation to help that along. However, first, I need to learn how to sort the wheat of Morphic from the chaff of MVC and whatever else is lying around in a Pharo image.
Any pointers to (more) definitive documentation and classes would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Mike
-- Michael J. Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>
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Hi,
I'm writing a desktop business application for a customer. Having written a number of web applications using Pharo and Seaside, I would like to use Pharo and Morphic in this case.
I have read the section on Morphic in `Pharo by Example', however, writing a business application (i.e. CRUD), I need to focus on (tedious) data browsing and entry, keyboard navigation, and so on as opposed to (cool) interactive morphs.
Did you check glamour? because if you have to manage data this is nice. You can build fast prototype of your application UI.
My problem is trying to discern the the current and most stable approach to using Morphic for such an application. Clearly, I have a wealth of code at my fingertips and the Squeak wiki has numerous posts, but many of the latter seem outdated and speak only vaguely of the MVC vs. Morphic situation. Do I use ToolBuilder?
you can.
Are pluggable morphs a vestige of MVC?
This is what I thought but I'm not sure. Normally we removed a lot of MVC
Do I use PolyMorph widgets?
Yes You can use the Polymorph tool builder.
Do I use dependencies, events, or announcements?
I am very interested in seeing Pharo succeed as a business application development tool (among other uses), and I would be quite happy to contribute to code and documentation to help that along.
We would love that. Thanks a lot.
However, first, I need to learn how to sort the wheat of Morphic from the chaff of MVC and whatever else is lying around in a Pharo image.
We too.
Any pointers to (more) definitive documentation and classes would be much appreciated.
UITheme example for example.
Regards,
Mike
-- Michael J. Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>
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On Feb 26, 2010, at 10:33 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
Are pluggable morphs a vestige of MVC?
This is what I thought but I'm not sure.
So back when Morpic was done, the philosophy was to bring over all tools with as little change as possible. So evem though MVC is gone, there is class Model, with lots of subclasses. And all the tools are build using the old MVC style change notification. The Browser is more or less the same as it used to be in ST80. So there is the Pluggable stuff, which I don't like. Than there the ToolBuilder, which is an abstraction on top. Not nice, either. Than eToys did build UIs (the blueish dialogs to e.g. load a project from disk) by copy-and-paste. Purely beautiful. And than besides that, there are a couple of other widgets (like gazillion button classes). And of course some real MVC remnants even after we removed most (e.g. SelectionMenu, CustomMenu...). All in all: very horrible. I think it would be worthwhile to actually build a *good* UI toolkit. Not having one makes building UIs far more complex that needed, which in turn makes people not improve the tools (or write better ones). Why can't this stuff be *simple* and *beautiful*? Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.
Maybe the Brazil part of Newspeak is an option? On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:
Why can't this stuff be *simple* and *beautiful*?
    Marcus
Yes but somebody has to do it. We are quite open but time is an important factor :) The idea with the architectural changes at the event system was that we should be able to have multiple solutions without having the isMorphic/isMVC tests everywhere in the code. Stef On Feb 27, 2010, at 12:57 AM, Richard Durr wrote:
Maybe the Brazil part of Newspeak is an option?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:
Why can't this stuff be *simple* and *beautiful*?
Marcus
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Unfortunately, I am not aware of any recent and consistent documentation for this subject. So this is a virgin subject which would make a very good chapter for the next PBE! :) Meanwhile, I have started to collect a few good links about Morphic, especially layouting which is not well covered by the tutorials (I think) http://www.visoracle.com/squeak/faq/ http://www.visoracle.com/squeak/faq/morphic_.html http://www.visoracle.com/squeak/faq/morphic-layout.html http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/3659 http://www.mail-archive.com/beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org/msg05525.ht... http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/792#Morphic On 25 févr. 2010, at 17:47, Michael Forster wrote:
Hi,
I'm writing a desktop business application for a customer. Having written a number of web applications using Pharo and Seaside, I would like to use Pharo and Morphic in this case.
I have read the section on Morphic in `Pharo by Example', however, writing a business application (i.e. CRUD), I need to focus on (tedious) data browsing and entry, keyboard navigation, and so on as opposed to (cool) interactive morphs.
My problem is trying to discern the the current and most stable approach to using Morphic for such an application. Clearly, I have a wealth of code at my fingertips and the Squeak wiki has numerous posts, but many of the latter seem outdated and speak only vaguely of the MVC vs. Morphic situation. Do I use ToolBuilder? Are pluggable morphs a vestige of MVC? Do I use PolyMorph widgets? Do I use dependencies, events, or announcements?
I am very interested in seeing Pharo succeed as a business application development tool (among other uses), and I would be quite happy to contribute to code and documentation to help that along. However, first, I need to learn how to sort the wheat of Morphic from the chaff of MVC and whatever else is lying around in a Pharo image.
Any pointers to (more) definitive documentation and classes would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Mike
-- Michael J. Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>
_______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
-- Simon
Thanks to all those who replied. I will give myself a couple of days to see if I can wrangle what I need out of the simplest Morphic widgets, ignoring ToolBuilder, etc. Mike -- Michael J. Forster <mike@sharedlogic.ca>
participants (6)
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laurent laffont -
Marcus Denker -
Michael Forster -
Richard Durr -
Simon Denier -
Stéphane Ducasse