Title: Bloc: a Modern Core for Highly Dynamic Graphics First Name: Stephane Last Name: Ducasse Type: Talk Abstract: Bloc is the new generation core for Pharo graphics. Bloc is a complete rewrite from scratch of core classes and logic of Morphic. Bloc is developed by A. Plantec since a couple of years, it is the result of several iterations and based on the experience accumulated by Alain while designing Miro and Miro2 several years ago. Bloc is the basis for Brick the new widget sets developed by the University of Bern. In this presentation we will show the essence of the design of Bloc. Bio: Stephane is directeur de recherche at Inria. He has more than 16 years of experience in software maintenance. He leads the RMoD (http://rmod.lille.inria.fr) team. He is expert in two domains: object-oriented language design and reengineering. He worked on traits, composable groups of methods, and this work got some impact. Traits have been introduced in Pharo, Perl, PHP and under a variant into Scala, Fortress of SUN Microsystems. He is also expert on software quality, program understanding, program visualizations, reengineering and metamodeling. He is one of the developer of Moose, an open-source software analysis platform http://www.moosetechnology.org/. He created http://www.synectique.eu/ a company building dedicated tools for advanced software analysis.

1. Bloc: a new Morphic
framework
Alain Plantec
Lab-STICC - University of Brest, France

2. Bloc in aNutshell
• Every morph has an affine matrix (zoom/rotation)
• A morph dynamically assembles listeners and has
views.
• Views and morphs can be composed via layout
• A morph lives in a space / universe
• It can schedule alarms
• Close to JavaFX

4. Reinvent the UI
• Be in par with Javascript and Java graphical
frameworks
• A foundation for upper-layers (widgets…)

5. Time to revisit Morphic
• Flexible
• Malleable
• But
• global coordinates
• complex protocol / code and logic are often unclear
• too much inheritance-based

6. Bloc
• Based on Miro and Miro2 experience
• Now at its fourth iteration
• Vector from the ground (rotation, zoom, translation)
• One constraint: morphic should be able to run
inside :)

10. Morph + View

11. Morph + View
Affine
transformation
+ layout protocol
+ redrawing

12. Morph + View
Composition with
local coordinate

13. Morph + View
extent
management +
rendering

14. Morph + View
Events
management

15. The Bloc infrastructure

16. The Bloc infrastructure
Morphic
HandMorph

17. The Bloc infrastructure
Morphic
WorldState

18. Event listeners

19. Alarms
[ self inform: ‘Pharo is great’] asAlarm schedule.

20. Alarms
| alarm |
alarm := [ self inform: ‘Pharo is great’] asAlarm.
alarm delay: 300.
alarm period: 100.
alarm schedule.
[ (Delay forSeconds: 5) wait.
alarm unschedule ] fork

21. Alarms
| alarm morph |
morph := BlRectangleView new asMorph.
morph openInWorld.
alarm := (WeakMessageSend receiver: morph selector: #color:) asAlarm.
alarm period: 100.
alarm argument: [Color random].
alarm schedule.
[ (Delay forSeconds: 5) wait.
morph delete ] fork

22. Architecture
Athens
Bloc
Brick
OSWindowVMEvent

23. Glimpse @ Brick

24. Bloc roadmap
• New graphic core of “Pharo 6.0”
• New foundation for new widgets (Brick)

25. Conclusion
• New framework with split responsibilities
• Dynamic addition of behavior and views
• Rethought event loop
• Multispaces