UI framework&design options

Hi!

I need to visualize&manipulate data within a graph representation.
Something like the "Maya Node Editor".

I am also interested in decorationless windows&widgets. Is it possible to embed entry fields, lists and such in the "desktop" of pharo?

What is suitable for overlay menus?

What would be the current framework to go with Pharo?
Which one will still stay for a while (is supported by Pharo) and is thought to be well tested.

Thank you for any advice, link, video, picture or hint.

Sebastian

Hi Sebastian,

Hi,

>
> It however does not support adding
> widgets without decoration straight to the desktop.
>

What about #openWorldWithSpec? As I understand this your top-level
widget becomes your desktop and you can do whatever you want with it.


>
> As for pretty graphs, I recommend Roassal2 by the ObjectProfile guys. It
> however cannot embed widgets in the graph as this is not its focus.
>

I didn't try it yet, but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't easily
hackable, even if not directly supported. In the worst case you'd need
to create RTView (or something similar, I read the docs long ago)
subclasses to wrap pluggable widgets.

BTW, when I browse Roassal2-Core I see almost all the classes are
undocumented. This makes it a bit hard to infer high-level design of
the code (it's common for me to work with Nautilus and pen&paper
notebook for this...) - is there a high-level overview of Roassal
architecture somewhere?


Best regards,
Piotr Klibert

>
> is there a high-level overview of Roassal
> architecture somewhere?
>

I just found http://agilevisualization.com/#book - last time I read
about Roassal was in a draft for Deep into Pharo a couple of years ago
and I'm glad to see that documentation situation improved so much.
Added to my reading list.


Best regards,
Piotr Klibert

> On 25 Jan 2015, at 13:26, Piotr Klibert <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>>
>> is there a high-level overview of Roassal
>> architecture somewhere?
>>
>
> I just found http://agilevisualization.com/#book

Yes, that one.

The thing with Roassal and friends is also the examples, there are tons of them.

But class comments would be good too ;-)

> - last time I read
> about Roassal was in a draft for Deep into Pharo a couple of years ago
> and I'm glad to see that documentation situation improved so much.
> Added to my reading list.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Piotr Klibert
>

That Maya Node Editor looks like a PasteUpMorph with Connectors to me.
You'd might want to wrap them (Morphic) in a  in a standard window
with menu bar and toolbar from either Spec or Glamour for now.

And then follow Bloc developments to move there.

Stephan

>
> is there a high-level overview of Roassal
> architecture somewhere?
>

I just found http://agilevisualization.com/#book - last time I read
about Roassal was in a draft for Deep into Pharo a couple of years ago
and I'm glad to see that documentation situation improved so much.
Added to my reading list.


Best regards,
Piotr Klibert

Okay, .... I am new to the UI implementations and options in the Pharo
world and I am really confused.

So, am I right to say.
- Polymorph is no more really the way to go?
- Spec is the official way to go right now?
- Roassal2 is the way to go for visualizations?
- Athens is well, I can't even say.... hmm interesting when it comes to SVG?
- Glamour has to be seen in conjunction with Moose? I had a look into
GTSpotter and I have the feeling this took a long long time for
implementation.
- No e.g. Google material like UI possible since there are no frameworks
available to do animation stuff.... didn't Squeak and E-Toys do that? Is
there nothing left in Pharo?
- Lumiere or Roassal3D when it come to sprites?

Are all of these framework compatible to each other? How much
maintenance and repair effort may I expect when I combine e.g. Spec with
Morphic and Roassal2?

VASmalltalk has a very strong separation of UI-View and UI-Control
layers. Which Pharo framework could allow me t replace the look and feel
of my application without loosing my event handling/ control layers?

This is Smalltalk and this is objects, and I am bound so much to a
windowing representation? There is nothing I could do like with HTML5
and css? Put some pictures in the world and just add event handlers to them?

So I might go with Spec and Morphic then? Glamour is more Moose? Or is
there a direction to deprecate one of them?

Thanks for all you into so far. I'll carefully read all the so far
provided resources.

Sebastian





On 2015-01-25 6:04 AM, Stephan Eggermont wrote:
> That Maya Node Editor looks like a PasteUpMorph with Connectors to me.
> You'd might want to wrap them (Morphic) in a  in a standard window
> with menu bar and toolbar from either Spec or Glamour for now.
>
> And then follow Bloc developments to move there.
>
> Stephan
>
>

Hi!

Is there any library or resource where I could have a look what others have done with Spec?
I have a hard time to find screenshots and additional information on what was used.

Sebastian

Hi Sebastian,

for building UIs I would go with Spec. It however does not support adding widgets without decoration straight to the desktop. What’s wrong with having them open in different windows? If the windows keep references to each other they can interact (more specifically if the different ComposableModels keep references to each other they can use each others’ public API … which you define as their implementer).

As for pretty graphs, I recommend Roassal2 by the ObjectProfile guys. It however cannot embed widgets in the graph as this is not its focus.

Greetings,

On Jan 25, 2015, at 04:09, Sebastian Heidbrink <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi!

I need to visualize&manipulate data within a graph representation.
Something like the "Maya Node Editor".

I am also interested in decorationless windows&widgets. Is it possible to embed entry fields, lists and such in the "desktop" of pharo?

What is suitable for overlay menus?

What would be the current framework to go with Pharo?
Which one will still stay for a while (is supported by Pharo) and is thought to be well tested.

Thank you for any advice, link, video, picture or hint.

Sebastian

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Johan Fabry   -   http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD lab  -  Computer Science Department (DCC)  -  University of Chile

Hi,

I’ll try to answer what I can ... Spec is the way to go, Roassal2 is the best visualization tool we have (and I think it’s excellent), Glamour is separate from Moose.

If I may simplify: Spec is for any kind of traditional user interface, where Glamour is for a subset of that: those where there is a flow of data from one widget to a next widget and so on.

Spec uses Morphic for its widgets, but is not tightly coupled to Morphic, the idea is to move on to other things later. Non-widget morphs can be incorporated in Spec windows, and Roassal2 visualizations also ( for example of the latter see my work on LRP http://pleiad.cl/LRP ). As long as I will be using Roassal2 (hopefully a long time) I can guarantee you that I will annoy the Roassal guys when integration with Spec breaks. In general this has never been a major issue, and I am quite sure that it never will be.



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Johan Fabry   -   http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD lab  -  Computer Science Department (DCC)  -  University of Chile

That’s easy :-), the Pharo tools themselves are examples. Have a look at the hierarchy of ComposableModel. You will not only find the basic widgets there, but also all UIs built with Spec that are delivered in Pharo. A random example from that is the code critics browser CriticBrowser.