Bridging the gap between morphic visual programming and smalltalk code

In this paper, we claim that both prototype-based visual programming and traditional Smalltalk class-based programming are required for developing applications with a GUI. We introduce Easy Morphic GUI (EMG), a framework that connects Morphic and EToys visual manipulation and scripting facilities with the usual Smalltalk development environment tools. The Squeak platform is used here as a playfield for our experiments. A step-by-step tutorial is used to illustrate the main aspects of the EMG framework. We also introduce two reuse operators: embed and clone in order to build new GUIs out of existing ones. embed inserts a GUI into another one, while clone makes the destination look the same as the original. Static and dynamic version of these operators are also investigated.

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