[Help-smalltalk] BLOX vs GTK

[Jan Vrany]

Hi, 

Luca's mail reminded me one thing I'm thinking about. 

Premise:
We need a good development environment for GST - 
workspace, convenient browser with refactoring 
and source code management support, easy-to-use
inspector and debugger and lot of other support 
tools. All in GUI. 

Paolo, are there any documents about Blox?
About it's concept, implementation. Any 
tutorial about creating gui applications in Blox?
I tried to read BloxBrowser, but it looks looks
very strange (in comparison to VisualWorks/SmalltalkX/Squeak
frameworks), I was unable to realize what method I
had to change to add a new menu item to workspace menus
and so on. It looks, that some widgets are not supported
in Blox, but are supported in GST GTK+ binding. 


What about to forgot Blox and build GST tools on 
pure GTK?

Advantages:
 - GTK+ 2.0 is quite good toolkit, is object-oriented,
   and is de-facto standard in OpenSource UNIX environment
   (can you imagine modern unix workstation without GTK+2.0
   libraries?)
 - GTK+ 2.0 concept (objects, signals, event) is relatively
   well-described in hundreds of tutorials, manuals and so on
   and is well-known in programmers community - so almost 
   everybody could write small GUI tool using GTK without 
   learning yet another toolkit (good for not-yet-smalltalkers)
 - We will have many usefull/specific widgets, not only those
   available in all supported toolkits. 
 - It save gst developer's time, cos there will be no need to
   create Blox adaptor every time the new widget will appear.
 - GTK+ have one of the best systems of creating ang binding
   shortcuts (one of the most problematic topic in VW,Morphic
   and St/X toolkits :-)
 - We can write relatively thin software layer (extension) 
   on the top of GTK to provide same API (resp. API with 
   same concept and ideas) as is available in VW and/or 
   Smalltalk/X (which is really very easy to use and many
   smalltalkers are familiar with it and really love it). 

Disadvantages
 - GST will be limited to platforms where GTK+2.0 is available.
   But now, gst runs just on unixes and GTK+2.0 runs well both on
   Unix/X-Window and Windows (two main platforms)

What do you thing about?


Jan

P.S.: Of course, it will be neccessary to stabilize GTK plugin
      first. 
      I would like help,but I don't know how :-(