And well… I think Nicolai is right in a point (not the fault of Brick, btw): current status is far from ideal:
- we have Morphic, and it’s upcoming replace, Brick (but Brick is not in the image, so the pain there is less) - we have Spec to support our tooling. - we have Glamour to support… well, our tooling too. - we have now Brick, who (AFAIS) is an extension of Morphic, and a replacement the Morphic Widgets and also Glamour. GTTools team has explicitly declared Brick will replace Glamour (but API will remain largely compatible, they say). GTTools team has also stated they would use Bloc is they could/when they can. - We have the old Text Editor - We have Rubric, which was stated to be “old stuff” and deprecated - We have also the new TxModel which intends to replace both, Text Editor and Rubric… but it cannot be used right now (or better: It cannot replace none of the previous yet) So… which one to use? We, the board, have something clear and some other not so clear yet, for example: - we would like to replace Morphic with Bloc, but this is a lot of work and will take a lot of time so in the mean time we also clean old Morphic as much as we can (and we encourage people to do it) - Spec needs work too - Glamour will be replaced by Brick, so do not use it - TxModel will replace all the previous, but it needs a lor of work. In the mean time, we suggest to use and improve Rubric, and of course, we would like to have more people contributing to TxModel. So well… yes this is a mess. Yes we are aware. No we don’t know when things will improve, but *they will*. In the mean time as a Pharo user, I would like to know which one should I use for my projects… this is my recommendation: - Do not use “direct” Morphic unless doing graphics - Use TxModel and if you cannot, Rubric - Use Brick or Spec, not Glamour (because Brick will replace it soon) And of course, I would help with fixes and reports on everything :) cheers, Esteban > On 24 Mar 2015, at 12:37, Tudor Girba <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Nicolai, > > I am surprised by your conclusion that the current Brick implementation > disqualifies it from being part of the Core :) > > Let's recap. > > Brick was created to support GT. We wanted GT in the image, hence Brick is in > the image as part of Glamour. In the meantime, Brick has grown and it's now > an almost standalone framework, but it is not yet advisable to use it apps > because it will likely change more. > > As Alex says, we do not want to have two competing new projects running in > parallel (Brick and Bloc) and fragmenting the effort even more. That is why, > for Pharo 5 we want to invest in Bloc. The interesting thing is that while > Bloc starts from scratch, Brick already works and has quite some high level > widgets and logic built in. Brick is already going in the same direction > expected by Bloc, so we will likely have the opportunity of moving Brick on > top of Bloc (Alex already did an experiment in this direction). > > Concretely, on March 31 and April 1 (no joke :)), we have a session in Bern > where Alain Plantec will join us to look into how to approach this problem > concretely. > > All in all, you should see Brick as a pragmatic intermediary step towards > removing Morph. I agree that it can be better (what cannot be), but I > disagree we should discard GT because of it. > > Cheers, > Doru > > > On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Nicolai Hess <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > 2015-03-23 20:54 GMT+01:00 Aliaksei Syrel <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>>: > Hi, > > Sorry if my reply will be too long, but I tried to summarise our experience > with Morphic/Brick and give some useful feedback or even provide ideas. Who > wants will read :) > > Hi, > thank you, this is a really great source of information, and it would be > heplful > to have this kind of write up somewhere else (not in the mailinglist). > But I did not question why we may need brick or why it is done. > My question was, what are the feature plans, is it just an experiment that > can vanish, so it is better to not use it for the core tools. Or is it meant > to be > THE new framework we should gain our focus on. > > > Brick is not a thin layer anymore. > It depends on what you mean under 'a thin layer' ;) Anyway, Brick was born > out of need. Spotter is completely built using Brick and Rubric. > > This is something I don't understand. As we integrated GT-Tools into the > image, Rubric > slipped in as it is need by GT. I asked what is the background, what are the > feature plans > and complained about the undocumented core classes, that makes it difficult > to see > what changed compared to the old text classes. Alain said he doesn't plan to > do further > work on Rubric. > So, WHY don't we replace and migrate the existing classes now and clean it > up. It takes so > much resources to maintain both. Every theme change, every change on > shortcuts/menus/keymapping, the athens drawing, all has to be double checked > - It is so exhausting. > > > No morphs are used at all (except Rubric of course). > > Well, all Bricks ARE morphs, they share the same state and api. > > All Bricks in Spotter in the end are subclasses of GLMBrick, which uses from > original Morph only Canvas (without drawing) and MorphicEvents. > > If so, the clean/better way would be to extract those part into a > "ProtoMorph" or a "PlainMorph". > and subclass from that once for Brick and again for Morphs. > Now we have Bricks, that are looking like a Morph, but aren't used to be one, > and probable doesn't even work if they are used as Morphs. > (Sure this is true for other Morphsubclasses as well, but that does not means > it doesn't hurt if we do more of this). > > Everything else was rewritten from scratch. During some period of time Brick > was able to render itself on Athens canvas, but we dropped it because of Font > issues in athens. > There are even more issues for Athens, and they don't vanish magically. There > are some issues > on fogbugz just waiting for some feedback, preferable from people intending > to use Athens. > > Spotter is not the only tool written using Brick, GLMPager - a pane pager in > GT-Inspector, GT-Playground and GT-Debugger is also completely done using > Brick. Almost all tab labels and tab selector in GT tools are Bricks. > > > ... > > > We really would like to move all tools to Bloc as soon as possible, but we > just need something right now that works and can be used in current version. > > But wyh not waiting on Bloc or (even better) help finishing Bloc. Why it is > needed to push > this into the release. > > I think we will never (but who knows) announce Brick as separate project. In > our minds it is just useful helper library. > > For me, this just disqualifies Brick from being used in the core image. > > > I see that many things in the GToolkit are better than the old one > (theming/layouting/delegate behavior in sub(classes/bricks). Great, it makes > fun to work with it,extending the inspector or Spotter search. > > But I don't understand why this is pushed that way and on top of the old > system/classes instead of cleaning that up. > > > nicolai > > > Thanks for reading :) > > Cheers, > Alex > > > > > -- > www.tudorgirba.com <http://www.tudorgirba.com/> > > "Every thing has its own flow"
