Re: [Help-smalltalk] BLOX vs GTK

[Paolo Bonzini]

> Paolo, are there any documents about Blox?
> About it's concept, implementation. Any 
> tutorial about creating gui applications in Blox?
>   
Blox is quite easy to understand (look at the demos in browser/test.st 
for an example).  The documentation taken from the source code is a 
decent reference.

The browser is another story.  The model-dispatcher system is incredibly 
complicated and I never really unravelled it.  Even the Namespace 
browser was mostly done by cut'n'paste'n'hope-it-works, I'm not very 
pleased to say...
> It looks, that some widgets are not supported
> in Blox, but are supported in GST GTK+ binding. 
>   
Though consider that the GTK+ bindings are inferior because they don't 
support Smalltalk models: for example, everything has to be a string to 
put it into a CList (or whatever it's called these days).
>  - It save gst developer's time, cos there will be no need to
>    create Blox adaptor every time the new widget will appear.
>   
It will have less flexibility for the toolkit user though.  It can be 
really useful to have wrappers that convert a Smalltalk model to a GTK+ 
model, or something like that.
>  - We can write relatively thin software layer (extension) 
>    on the top of GTK to provide same API (resp. API with 
>    same concept and ideas) as is available in VW and/or 
>    Smalltalk/X (which is really very easy to use and many
>    smalltalkers are familiar with it and really love it).
I disagree, but... :-)

Paolo