Stef, Exciting news all around. Is this s good opportunity to revisit theming? I made a good attempt to wrap my head around themes about a year ago or so, but it's quite complex. If now's not (understandably) the time, how will themes work with this new multiple-backend approach? On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 11:45 AM Alexandre Bergel via Pharo-users < pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> wrote:

Hi Stef,

Thanks for this email. Spec 2 really looks great. It is also great to foresee an integration of Bloc/Brick in Pharo.

Cheers, Alexandre

...

On May 2, 2019, at 5:27 AM, ducasse <stepharo@netcourrier.com> wrote:

Dear Pharoers

We would like to explain what is Spec 2.0 and how Bloc is on the Pharo roadmap.

Spec is a way to support a way to express and reuse application interaction logic. Spec was first developed by Benjamin van Ryseghem and others while supervised by Stéphane Ducasse. Over the years we cleaned Spec, but we never took the time to really revisit it, and Spec was never stressed outside the scope of Pharo tools (even if there is some people who used it in their projects, this was not the general case). There was a need to deeply rethink the way we express and reuse interaction application logic.

Spec 2.0 revisits fundamentally Spec. The consortium wants to acknowledge the strong financial support of Schmidt in this new development. Here is a list of points we are working on to support companies to build modern applications with Pharo.

- adding support for many widgets and at the same time improving existing widgets such as fasttable - adds much better layouts (we will deprecate the interpreter design) - introducing a new way to architecture an application: Spec20 introduces the notion of application to better handle resources and window flow - revisiting the internal logic of Spec (to remove useless parts and enhance the ones that works) - adding many tests

In addition we want that Spec 2.0 is not tight anymore with Morphic. Why? Because we want to make sure that: - companies can deploy desktop applications - we can reuse all the tools logic of Pharo with new widgets sets such as Brick (widgets on top of Bloc) without having to rewrite everything.

This is why Spec2.0 can optionally render using Gtk3.0. It also means that in the future we can have native widgets.

Now that Bloc/Brick is finally reaching a point where it can be tried and eventually adopted, we want to make sure the transition to it will not force us to throw away the tools we developed last ten years. We think that Bloc needs some effort to clean and structure it and Spec2.0 gives the time to let Bloc and Brick mature. Also, we want to make sure that in the future we will be able to adopt other backends in case we decide it (Remember new now is old tomorrow and while Bloc/Brick is new and modern, it will not remain new and modern forever).

Brick needs to be ready for Pharo consumption, and to make it possible we need to move the image to converge. With Spec 2.0, in future versions we will just need to define a new backend to get all our tools working.

The Pharo Board

-- Eric