December 2014 - Pharo-users

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by Esteban Lorenzano

if I can say it, I think Spec has several design flaws, that prevent us to actually use it productively. 1st: I believe Spec is 80% of what Morphic should do by it self, but since is now that monster no body wants to take by the horns, Spec provides a layer. 2nd: The original idea of Spec is to produce composable objects that can be some-kind described and then reused by plugging them, but - is an idea that has a lot of sense is we have a UI builderâ¦ which we dont. 2 - the metadata itself is not very well defined (I would like something like the ones in VW and StX, but is like a weird array right now), because of this, Spec has created some âin the middleâ way to define specs in a more âdeclarative wayâ, breaking the original design (the one I just pointed) 3rd: Frankly, with this âmore declarative wayâ spec adopted more or less the same path glamour took. But if this is the point, glamour does a really better work on the âdeclarativeâ part. Of course, it does that at the cost of being less reusable, but wellâ¦ we are talking about Spec, not Glaour here :) So, to summarise, IMHO: - Spec wouldnât have much sense in a well-defined, clean, Morphic - Even as a layer, Spec still does not has much sense without: -- a rebuild of the descriptive model -- an UI builder to use it. cheers, Esteban > On 19 Dec 2014, at 17:32, nacho <0800nacho(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I too prefer Morphic over Spec. I find Spec too much verbose. And in fact, > Morphic as presented in the Self language it's a much modern approach to > building UIs than Spec which is pure code. So as complicated as it might > have become, I'm still attached to Morphic. > > > > > ----- > Nacho > Smalltalker apprentice. > Buenos Aires, Argentina. > -- > View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Question-about-Morphic-in-Pharo-4-tp4796331p4796449.h… > Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by nacho

Esteban, I agree 100%. In fact that was, in part, the reason of my question. As I don't see a Spec UI coming soon I was wondering if perhaps Morphic will be trimmed in Pharo 4. Thanks Cheers Nacho ----- Nacho Smalltalker apprentice. Buenos Aires, Argentina. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Question-about-Morphic-in-Pharo-4-tp4796331p4796452.h… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by nacho

I too prefer Morphic over Spec. I find Spec too much verbose. And in fact, Morphic as presented in the Self language it's a much modern approach to building UIs than Spec which is pure code. So as complicated as it might have become, I'm still attached to Morphic. ----- Nacho Smalltalker apprentice. Buenos Aires, Argentina. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Question-about-Morphic-in-Pharo-4-tp4796331p4796449.h… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by kilon alios

Well Spec from what I understand requires a model for each thing you add to it which makes classes bigger and unecessary complex. I also dont like the name defaultSpec which for me mean nothing and creates confusion. Other classes I see use name defaultSpec2 which makes even less sense. Generally speaking Spec is a library that I find very hard to figure out from example and reading the code compared to Morphic. Also a shortcoming of spec is that is not designed to be custom gui friendly from what I see since it seems to just wrap morphs if you want custom element guis. Also I dont understand why we need initialise and instiate , looks to me like Spec requires too many definitions to add stuff together which is an area that Morphic excel AFAIK where in example of Morphic all you have to do is addMorph: in Spec it appears to me there so many steps. If I want to add a button then I should using a single line of code. Generally speaking my Nireas class is an extremely simple GUI that is uneccessary complex. Sure I could brake the GUI to smaller Spec widgets but for me that makes no sense for such a small GUI. I cant see with all this overhead how Spec would be useful for me for very complex guis I want to create in the long run when Morphic design is so clear to me. Another thing to note here is that I have read the Spec documentation again and again and it has been a seriously struggle to make sense of Spec because of this complex and weird design. Morphic on the other hand has been a walk in the park for some guis I created with it because its design is so simple and elegant. I never read docs on Morphic , I just take a look at Morph examples and immediately understand how things work. Saying that I had issues understanding how treemorph worked and cant say I liked the code. That also may have to do with how I work which is that I was raised with legos so I love to assemble things together instead of abstracting them away which I think is what Spec tries to do. So Morphic definitely fits my way of thinking better. On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 5:50 PM, Johan Fabry <jfabry(a)dcc.uchile.cl> wrote: > > > On Dec 19, 2014, at 07:44, kilon alios <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > See this is where we get in the area of personal preference, I find Spec > very ugly. I mean really , really ugly. I used it to develop my theme > manager Nireas and I definetly dont like its workflow and now I am > seriously looking into porting Nireas back to Morphic and developing my own > library to fix Morphic shortcomings. > > I ask this to understand the problem: can you tell me what you find really > ugly about Spec, why you donât like its workflow, and why Morphic does it > better in your opinion? > > TIA > > ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- > > Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry > PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile > > >

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by Johan Fabry

> On Dec 19, 2014, at 07:44, kilon alios <kilon.alios(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > See this is where we get in the area of personal preference, I find Spec very ugly. I mean really , really ugly. I used it to develop my theme manager Nireas and I definetly dont like its workflow and now I am seriously looking into porting Nireas back to Morphic and developing my own library to fix Morphic shortcomings. I ask this to understand the problem: can you tell me what you find really ugly about Spec, why you donât like its workflow, and why Morphic does it better in your opinion? TIA ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <--- Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile

Dec. 19, 2014

Metacello does not load the expected version from ConfigOf

by Usman Bhatti

Hi all, I am trying to load a specific version of PetitParser in a Moose image. A Moose image comes with the latest development version of PetitParser. So, I am trying to downgrade to an older version. So, when I load the version manually, older versions of the packages are loaded: (ConfigurationOfPetitParser project version: '1.51') load But when I try to load the same version within my ConfigOf the expected packages are not loaded and list of the PetitParser packages loaded remains unchanged. Here is how my baseline looks like: ConfigurationOfDummyParser>>baseline01: spec <version: '0.1-baseline'> spec for: #'common' do: [ spec blessing: #'baseline'. spec project: 'PetitParser' with: [ spec className: #ConfigurationOfPetitParser; versionString: '1.51'; repository: 'http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/Moose/PetitParser/main/' ]. ]. I also tried creating a version but it didn't help. ConfigurationOfDummyParser>>version10: spec <version: '1.0' imports: #('0.1-baseline' )> spec for: #'common' do: [ spec blessing: #'stable'. spec description: 'version 1.0'. spec author: 'usmanbhatti'. spec timestamp: '12/19/2014 16:35'. spec project: 'PetitParser' with: '1.51'. ]. I also had a look at the package the configuration tries to load and the list shows correct packages to be loaded (see screenshot). Does anyone have an idea what may be problematic in my code or that of Metacello? I am attaching the code of my ConfigOf for a Moose image. Thanks in advance. Usman[image: Inline image 1]

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by Sean P. DeNigris

Daniel Lyons wrote > My impression is that Morphic must have started out as a small and > beautiful core. Otherwise you wouldn't find so many people talking about > how amazing it was in writings dated 10 years ago and earlier The idea is revolutionary and beautiful - that everything you see on the screen can be dealt with like a physical object in the real world; you would "pick up" a picture from a web page or "pick up" a menu item to anchor to the desktop as easily as you can pick up a file icon and drop it in another folder. It was originally implemented in Self, so "small and beautiful" buzz may have been from that setting. From what I understand, Squeak's Morphic was stuffed with experiments from very early on. Daniel Lyons wrote > I have also heard that Morphic made more sense in its original habitat in > Self, because you really could just clone a UI component and start > customizing it, because Self only has instances, no classes. The "direct > manipulation" argument is slightly sabotaged by the intrusion of a class > hierarchy and textual coding. I have heard that a lot too, but don't think it's really true. If you define the state that makes a morph a morph, why can't you implement a way to save that current state to a subclass or update the current class? It's just that no one's implemented it yet, probably because few people remember the Dynabook and Morphic visions that make direct, live, uniform manipulation important, and the blue plane ideas have degenerated to pink plane "how do we easily make business UIs; not that that's not an important goal, too, but I would hate to forget the revolutionary power we have underneath! ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Question-about-Morphic-in-Pharo-4-tp4796331p4796438.h… Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] [ANN] RProjectConnector V1.0

by Blondeau Vincent

De : Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org] De la part de HernÃ¡n Morales Durand EnvoyÃ© : jeudi 18 dÃ©cembre 2014 05:31 Ã : Any question about pharo is welcome Objet : Re: [Pharo-users] [ANN] RProjectConnector V1.0 Hi Vincent, Hi, 2014-12-17 6:02 GMT-03:00 Blondeau Vincent <vincent.blondeau(a)worldline.com<mailto:vincent.blondeau@worldline.com>>: Hernan, To detect the R installation path is complicated. Yes, I am currently working in a NBWin32Registry so we can do: (NBWin32Registry hKeyLocalMachine at: 'Software\R-core\R') values the reason I didn't committed a solution is I am having ERROR_INVALID_FUNCTION with RegEnumValueA apiRegEnumValue: hKey with: dwIndex with: lpValueName with: lpcchValueName with: lpReserved with: lpType with: lpData with: lpcbData " http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724865%28v=vs.85%… " <primitive: #primitiveNativeCall module: #NativeBoostPlugin error: errorCode> ^ self nbCall: #( long RegEnumValueA( HKEY hKey, DWORD dwIndex, LPTSTR lpValueName, LPDWORD lpcchValueName, LPDWORD lpReserved, LPDWORD lpType, LPBYTE lpData, LPDWORD lpcbData)) module: 'advapi32.dll' Where is the Windows registry access project? I think that to set the libraries available to download on a server is currently a better idea. Do you know where it can be hosted? An option to upload library files could be http://files.pharo.org/ but I don't have access to. Foy my configurations I am currently using DropBox although not charming it serves well. But AFAIK you cannot link multiple accounts to one DropBox. There are other reliable options? http://files.pharo.org/ seems to be a good solution. Vincent HernÃ¡n ________________________________ Ce message et les piÃ¨ces jointes sont confidentiels et rÃ©servÃ©s Ã l'usage exclusif de ses destinataires. Il peut Ã©galement Ãªtre protÃ©gÃ© par le secret professionnel. Si vous recevez ce message par erreur, merci d'en avertir immÃ©diatement l'expÃ©diteur et de le dÃ©truire. L'intÃ©gritÃ© du message ne pouvant Ãªtre assurÃ©e sur Internet, la responsabilitÃ© de Worldline ne pourra Ãªtre recherchÃ©e quant au contenu de ce message. Bien que les meilleurs efforts soient faits pour maintenir cette transmission exempte de tout virus, l'expÃ©diteur ne donne aucune garantie Ã cet Ã©gard et sa responsabilitÃ© ne saurait Ãªtre recherchÃ©e pour tout dommage rÃ©sultant d'un virus transmis. This e-mail and the documents attached are confidential and intended solely for the addressee; it may also be privileged. If you receive this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy it. As its integrity cannot be secured on the Internet, the Worldline liability cannot be triggered for the message content. Although the sender endeavours to maintain a computer virus-free network, the sender does not warrant that this transmission is virus-free and will not be liable for any damages resulting from any virus transmitted.

Dec. 19, 2014

Re: [Pharo-users] Question about Morphic in Pharo 4

by kilon alios

> > " Then I guess it grew rapidly and radically out of control and became > this monstrosity " Where are the people running screaming , where are the superheroes to save the day ? Think about it, if Morphic was really ugly that started as something beautiful then someone would have rebooted Morphic by now and started something from scratch and replaced Morphic by now. I have been very closely following pharo lists for a couple of years now and I have not seen so many people complain about Morphic. Sure Morphic has its own messes to deal with but please find me a library of the size of Morphic that is not messy in some areas. You think that QT , GTK , Winforms etc are not heavily criticized ? Think again. GUI APIs are big ugly and prone to confusion and bad designs. The problem with modern GUI APIs are that the demands for them are super complex. Looks at web browser which are now the forefront of GUI design is a ton of mess because the demands are really that complex . Take a look at 3d applications, 2d app, audio apps and music apps and you will find that many of them use their own GUI APIs. Why people tolerate these big messy GUIs APIs , why they tolerate the ugliness of html/css ? The answer Is simple . because they offer what they need . Same applies with Morphic, its big and complex because we need it to be big and complex. Could the design being improved ? sure and Morphic is constantly improving , I make my own contribution as well because its an area that heavily interests me. But make no mistake about it, you will never have a shoe that fits all. For me its much better to have several tools and libraries that help us deal with the complexity of Morphic than simplifying Morphic by removing useful features in sake of simplifying. If you want to see what real monstrosity looks like take a look at MFC, its the only library of any kind that I know that desperately needs an exorcism. "Following the Spec tutorial (which is excellent, by the way!)" See this is where we get in the area of personal preference, I find Spec very ugly. I mean really , really ugly. I used it to develop my theme manager Nireas and I definetly dont like its workflow and now I am seriously looking into porting Nireas back to Morphic and developing my own library to fix Morphic shortcomings. However this is what is amazing about Pharo we live in a time that because of the active development and contribution you have many choices and you can choose the one that fits you better or the one you like the most. For the example even though I dont like html/css as you may have guessed by now, I would love to have webkit or some other web browser engine embeded inside the pharo image and so being able to display websites from inside pharo. None can question the incredible value of diversity of options. "I have also heard that Morphic made more sense in its original habitat in Self, because you really could just clone a UI component and start customizing it, because Self only has instances, no classes." I think prototype based programming is great because offers to the developer more power in more elegant way than classes. I think you will find few people not agreeing on this, even one of the creators of Smalltalk , Ingalls, said something along the lines that if he had to redesign Smalltalk would have made it prototype based. But and thats a big but in practice I seriously question the usefulness of prototype based programming. Take a look at Pharo its class based but still easy to hack , right ? Yet people are reluctant to hack and for a good reason. Because you have to deal with merge hell , people hacking the same thing as you or you do something and system misbehaves because you hacked an object that another object depended on. So classes for me are there to provide a more concrete implementation and area that is labeled "modify with extreme care" . Afterall its not that hard to take a Morph class subclass it and create your own class instead of changing that Morph class directly. But as I said I agree that prototype based programming is more elegant but in the end it does not matter as much as you think it does, because if it did then Prototype based would be dominant by now. So to summarize , no Morphic fits Pharo like a glove. "Spec seems to be promising non-Morphic backends, is that an active development interest and if so what targets are being explored?" Spec is a wrapper meaning knowing spec does not require to know Morphic and that means also it can exist without Morphic, not currently, but probably one day. PolyMorph is an extension of Morphic meaning you have to know Morphic and depends on it. So they are two very fundamentally different things. I think however this is a moot point. The bottom line is that GUI development is an extremely important part of Pharo and any other programming language. If you can bet on anything is that GUI APIs of any kind will keep evolving , so yes Morphic will keep improving, Spec will keep improving and we will see new kids in the block like we already see with Bloc and Brick, Some of them will be small and elegant solutions but limited, other will be big and complex but powerful. But hey who can predict the future ?

Dec. 19, 2014

[ANN] WKHTML2PDF for Pharo

by Torsten Bergmann

Need an easy way to convert HTML into PDF for printing? The project http://wkhtmltopdf.org can help you here. If you want to use it from Pharo just check out: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~TorstenBergmann/WKHTML2PDF This project allows you to easily use the library. First select the engine: HTML2PDFConverter useExecutable. or HTML2PDFConverter useLibrary. and then convert: HTML2PDFConverter convert: 'http://www.pharo.org' toFile: 'pharo.pdf' to get a printable version of the Pharo homepage. As ever docu is on the STHub project website. It uses NativeBoost to call the library and OSProcess to call the executable. Bye T.

Dec. 19, 2014