On May 11, 2017, at 12:36 PM, Alain Plantec via Pharo-dev <pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> wrote:

From: Alain Plantec <alain.plantec@yahoo.com>

Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] [ann] bloc & cairo+morphic

Date: May 11, 2017 at 12:36:36 PM GMT-3

To: Pharo Development List <pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org>

Cc: Alain Plantec <alain.plantec@yahoo.com>, Moose-related development <moose-dev@list.inf.unibe.ch>, Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>

Hello Doru, all,

I’m really happy to see Bloc progresses.
Even I’m not active since more than one year, Bloc is still an important project for me.

but let me complete this short historical presentation a little bit.

Bloc is a project that I initiated in 2013 in collaboration with RMOD following experiments made around the ROME project.
The idea was to completely revisit the 2D framework of Pharo to address Morphic limits.
Following an invitation of the Software Composition Group (thanks to Oscar Nierstrasz and to Doru here),
I presented the first version of Bloc at Bern (March, 2015), then Doru and Aliaksel joined the project.
One year ago, during his PhD at Brest, Glenn Cavarle produced a new version of the Bloc infrastructure that is now the
one used together with the layouting system that was implemented by Aliaksel.

Please, do not use the humane assessment web site but the github project one instead.

I will restart working on Bloc/Brick soon in the context of a project that we recently signed with the Thales company.

Thanks,
Cheers

Alain

On 8 mai 2017, at 23:00, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:

Hi,

We are happy to announce that based on the work of Glenn, Alex extended Bloc (Sparta) to work directly in the Morphic world using Cairo as a backend.

Cairo is less powerful than Moz2D (see the screenshot below for an example), but the implementation addresses a concern that the community raised regarding a perceived increased liability due to the dependency to Moz2D. Essentially this means that Bloc can be treated as another graphical library that can coexist with Morphic without requiring any external VM plugin.

<bloc-two-backends-morphic-host-figures.png>

I would also like to point out that adding a new backend and host was possible because of the many iterations (including throwing away whole implementations) that Alex and Glenn went through. I think they did an amazing job.

You can find a bit more details about Bloc here:
http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/bloc-flexible-backends-hosts/

Another issue raised regarding Bloc was that of the engineering effort required to make it a reality. That is why I would also like to announce that Alex joined feenk.com where he is primarily working on the graphical stack for Pharo.

Cheers,
Doru


--
www.tudorgirba.com
www.feenk.com

"To lead is not to demand things, it is to make them happen."