The only GUI API inside the standard Pharo image is Morphic.

Everything else are just Helper APIs , aka APIs that make easier to use Morphic.

They basically sit on top of Morphic making use of its functionality and abilities.

Actually there are more than the ones you mentioned. Bloc will be the future replacement for Morphic but even when Bloc replaces Morphic will not radical change things because it is compatible with Morphic.

In short Morphic currently is unavoidable.

However there are APIs to make creating GUIs easier with Morphic without necessarily requiring from you to know how to use Morphic. Spec is such example as is Brick as well.

Glamour falls under the category of a specialised helpers because it mostly meant to be used for the creation of browsers not for general purpose APIs.

However that does not mean Morphic is not "high level" , it actually comes with a lot of ready made widgets to make your life easier. It does however have a lot of nasty parts too and this is why you see so many APIs around you that confuse you.

In reality each one of them solves a slightly diffirent problem and each one of them have a different style. So see it as more alternative solutions to choose from which is good.

If you want to do something demanding GUI wise, you will be learning Morphic anyway because its the engine that drives all this APIs currently, in the future those APIs may work on top of Bloc , but since Bloc wants to be compatible with Morphic this is good news for you because you can carry your knowledge about Morphic to Bloc.

Spec is good if you want to quickly make GUIs without heavy customization.

You could also use multiple of them at the same time depending on the widgets you plan to design and do the difficult parts in pure Morphic, any API you use you always have access to the Morphic widgets it uses called "Morphs" anyway.

Because Spec is the one with the best documentation, I advise to start with Spec and depending on your needs you can start to worry about Morphic later on.

Generally speaking you dont need to panic, people around here are very happy to answer any question you may have, so even without documentation its very unlikely that you will be left alone to figure things out by yourself.

So start experimenting and ask a ton of questions.

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 5:26 PM Brad Selfridge <bsselfridge@gmail.com> wrote:
Ok! I'm really confused. I'm wanting to write new GUI and I have no idea
which framework to use. There is very little documentation on any of these
and I don't see a clear cut statement of direction as to where the Pharo
community is heading.

Can someone please advise?

Thanks.



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Brad Selfridge
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