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 <steph...@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
