Morphic -
The Squeak User Interface
History
John Maloney and Randy Smith originally developed Morphic as the Self user
interface framework. The Self project was developed at Sun Microsystems.
Basically, it was like a Smalltalk system but without classes. The development
was officially stopped, but it had a strong influence on other systems.
That version of the framework is described in [7]. Later, John joined Squeak
Central, and Morphic was ported to Squeak.
Morphic in Self
As stated above, Self is an object environment similar to Smalltalk. But
it has no classes. So, objects are created by copying a prototype object,
and modifying it. Variables and methods can be added. The way to build
a new morph in Self is therefore to clone some existing one, and by manipulating
with Morphic tools, to add submorphs and methods as needed. (There are
some administrative details to make this new morph available for further
reuse by copying it.) If you are interested in the Self project and its
Morphic implementation, you can read the Self
Morphic paper, or look in http://www.sun.com/research/self/.
Adapting the Morphic framework to Squeak Smalltalk
Smalltalk is a class based language. This shows the need for a class hierarchy.
As Self Morphic had clearly separated prototype morphic object from the
morphs you actually use, it was possible to turn each one into a Smalltalk
class. This gave the basic Morphic hierarchy for Squeak.