Re: [ann] bloc & cairo+morphic - Moose-dev

12 May 2017

Hi,

It seems that my initial message generated a misunderstanding.

My original blog post was meant to communicate two things:
1. That the known Bloc project has received a new feature that the community raised as a
problem (i.e., host & backend).
2. Address the other concern that the community raised: how to sustain the Bloc
development in terms of engineering effort. This is why we announced the financial support
for the work of Alex that is valid from this point on.

The post was certainly not intended to overlook the people that contributed to the overall
project. I apologize if it looked like this.

To clarify the historical perspective, we now added an explicit history page on the
official project page:
https://github.com/pharo-graphics/Bloc/blob/master/HISTORY.md

I also changed the blog post to more clearly communicate the intent:
http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/bloc-flexible-backends-hosts/

I hope this addresses the concerns. I am really excited that Alain joined and that we can
get even more traction around Bloc.

Cheers,
Doru

...
  On May 12, 2017, at 7:56 AM, Stephane Ducasse
&lt;stepharo.self(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

 BTW for an historical perspective

 RMoD me and igor were also involved far less than the effort of alain but as he mentioned
it we collaborated on it. I spent time on documenting several versions and I stopped
disgusted to see the total lack of attention for comments. 
 Then Rmod paid nearly a year of effort on Athens, SDL20 support, a year on TxText. I find
really strange that we are not even mentioned in any support.

 Stef

 On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 8:12 PM, Stephane Ducasse &lt;stepharo.self(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
 Doru can you change the humane assessment blog post?

 On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Tudor Girba &lt;tudor(a)tudorgirba.com&gt; wrote:
 Hi,

 Indeed, this is wonderful news that you will rejoin your baby project :).

 Cheers,
 Doru

  On May 11, 2017, at 6:40 PM, Alexandre Bergel
&lt;alexandre.bergel(a)me.com&gt; wrote:

 Hi Alain!

 Thanks for the mail (even if the historial part has always been pretty clear to me).
 We miss you! Be back soon!

 Cheers,
 Alexandre
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 Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
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  On May 11, 2017, at 12:36 PM, Alain Plantec via
Pharo-dev &lt;pharo-dev(a)lists.pharo.org&gt; wrote:

 From: Alain Plantec &lt;alain.plantec(a)yahoo.com&gt;
 Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] [ann] bloc & cairo+morphic
 Date: May 11, 2017 at 12:36:36 PM GMT-3
 To: Pharo Development List &lt;pharo-dev(a)lists.pharo.org&gt;
 Cc: Alain Plantec &lt;alain.plantec(a)yahoo.com&gt;om>, Moose-related development
&lt;moose-dev(a)list.inf.unibe.ch&gt;ch>, Any question about pharo is welcome
&lt;pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org&gt;

 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
&lt;tudor(a)tudorgirba.com&gt; 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

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