There are a number of separate problems here, I think. Mixing them up makes the situation a bit complex. I'll try separating them here.
At what abstraction level should the basic tools be build. From my point of view, Glamour provides the right level. It is very easy to build browsers and it is easy to keep them maintainable. When the underlying stack is going to be replaced it makes sense to have an abstraction layer that is is easy to implement on both the old and the new stack. The alternatives (Morphic, PolyMorph, OmniBrowser, ToolBuilder) are much less accessible. OmniBrowser looks much more comprehensive, but I don't feel qualified to comment on its usability as abstraction layer. I have taken a look at creating a google issue browser with Glamour (before ssl support) and think the committer workflow should be able to be improved with a few specialized Glamour browsers. But my opinion does not matter so much. That decision should be taken by the people maintaining the core of Pharo. Does Glamour provide enough functionality to build a whole tool chain? The focus of Glamour is on navigation in a single window, the language for updating and editing is limited. Drag-and-drop support is missing. Should the programming style of Glamour be the style to build basic tools in Pharo? Would it be better to use something more similar to the Seaside canvas style? The behavior change based on the number of block parameters is very powerful but imho also confusing. On the other hand I'm pretty sure HelpBrowser initWindow is worse than the equivalent Glamour code would be. At the moment the modularization of Pharo is not yet good enough. It is not easy enough to (de)compose images, so the maintainers need to have in the core image code to create user interfaces (web-based :) or direct). When we can create very small images and work with them using remote tools, this need will disappear. Committing to a tool chain build on top of Glamour would mean either back porting Glamour to earlier versions of Squeak/Pharo, so the new tools can replace the old ones everywhere, or breaking old tools and having to maintain them all ourselves. That is, if current maintainers agree with that. Happy new year, Stephan
