Hi Peter,

Thank you very much for that overview!

It looks like even just creating a window with no other widgets is sort of "hard-wired" to Morphic through ComposableModel>>defaultWindowModelClass, so maybe just overriding that and trying to create a Cocoa window model and adapter is the place to start.

I need to find a good starting point because you can't poke at the existing code too much since even the debugger is built with Spec!

It's pretty exciting, though, because it feels like all the right pieces are there and a lot of this could mostly be "just work" once I get going.

Thanks again,

Rob

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 6:04 PM, Peter Uhnak <i.uhnak@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Rob,

I guess the best resource at the moment is to just look at existing adapters.

But here are some thoughts to get you started:

(Spec) ComposableModel has as its widget (Spec) Adapter
Adapter has as its widget the actual visual component, which currently means Morphic.


The simplest example: LabelModel

1. model to adapter

LabelModel is adapted by MorphicLabelAdapter:

you can see on the class side in method `defaultSpec`.
There is only `LabelAdapter` there because there is some extra mapping for some classes, but you can specify directly the class of the Adapter, so the following would work just as well:

LabelModel class>>defaultSpec
�� �� �� �� <spec>

�� �� �� �� ^ #(MorphicLabelAdapter
�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� adapt: #(model))


LabelModel -> LabelAdapter direct event propagation (pushing changes)

in Model world you can call changed:with: to execute code on the Adapter, e.g.

self changed: #emphasis: with: {emphasis}

which in turn will call the #emphasis: method on the LabelAdapter.

LabelModel -> LabelAdapter events (pulling changes)

preferred alternative is to do the opposite; properties of models are often held in ValueHolders, which can be observed on ValueChange, so the Adapter can register to event change and react on itself;

you can see this best in MorphicTabAdapter (but you will see that TabAdapter looks a bit different from the rest, because I was experimenting with cleaning up Adapters...)

2. adapter to morphic

Every adapter implements #buildWidget method that returns a Morphic Object.
Typically the adapter registers itself as the model of the adapter (so adapter's model is Spec, and Morphic's model is the adapter). This depends a lot on the API of morphic. (in TabAdapter I'm overriding adapt: so there's no buildWidget, and it is in #buildWidgetWith:).

It is all kinds of messy, but if you have other widgets then it will be a good test how well Spec can handle it... or rather we'll see how it can be improved...

Peter



On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 05:10:39PM -0400, Rob Rothwell wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have recently been lucky enough to get the Cocoa portion of Mars working
> on Pharo 5.0.�� While there are some issues, it has a wonderful set of
> examples that allowed me create new Cocoa classes and delegate methods and
> see a straightforward path to learning how to use Coco widgets from Pharo.
>
> I'd like to do that by creating appropriate Spec adapters, but
> unfortunately the new Spec booklet wasn't designed for that!
>
> Can anyone give me any insight into creating (and using) a new Spec
> adapter?�� Maybe just some high level steps to help me orient my
> investigation into how Spec works?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Rob