Normally, there should not be an inheritance relationship between
wrapper and wrappee, but I agree that describing Morphs as wrappers
around Forms seems to miss the point. The notion of wrapper usually
implies that there is little modification to the protocol of the
wrappee, a wrapper should not need a lot of code. But Morphs are a
completely different level of the architecture, with a large and complex
protocol that's very different from Forms. So let's start again.
Forms are images (implemented as rectangular pixel arrays, as stated).
Morphs are the objects that describe how the graphical interface works,
they control displaying (for which they use Forms), handling of user
input (mouse clicks, dragging etc) and above all the internal structure
of the interface (for example the different regions that make up a
window on the screen are Morphs). Note that the user display side of the
Pharo interface is handled by class DisplayScreen, which is a subclass
of Form. So the Morphs in the user interface display themselves by
inserting their Forms in the proper places on the Form that is the
internal representation of the screen.
So, as Subbu said, you don't convert Morphs to Forms, they serve
different purposes. Morphs (some Morphs) have instance variables that
allow them to refer to the Form that they use for displaying. Hope that
helps a bit.
I note that all of this (plus some more) you can essentially get from
the class comments of the two.
Markus
On 25/2/20 12:22 pm, Steve Quezadas wrote:
Ben,
I checked, [Form] is inherited from class [DisplayMedium]. So in
smalltalk, the inheritence pattern is:
Object -> DisplayObject -> DisplayMedium -> Form
The inheritence pattern of ImageMorph is:
Object -> Morph -> ImageMorph
One does not inherit the other and is not a wrapper, at least in Pharo8
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 10:11 PM Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com
<mailto:b...@openinworld.com>> wrote:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 at 04:31, Steve Quezadas <steve...@gmail.com
<mailto:steve...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I usually like to go through the source code to answer my own
question, but I can't tell by reading it.
[Morph], from what I understand, deals with manipulating
graphics on smalltalk. But when I use ZnEasy to get a jpeg
file, I notice that it returns a [Form] and not a [Morph] to
display a jpeg. Spec2 also wants [Form] for displaying images
rather than [Morph].
So what is the difference between a [Form] and a [Morph] since
they both seem to deal with graphics?
I don't know the exact answer, but if you review method
ImageMorph>>form
you will see that the ImageMorph is a wrapper around a Form.
So some simple differences that may be inferred.
- Many morphs are not bitmaps.
- Morphs are GUI elements, i.e. interact with mouse and keyboard
- Forms are not GUI elements
- Forms can be manipulated without displaying them.
In some other graphics system, an analogy could be putting an
image on a button and asking "what is the difference between an
'image' and a 'button' ?"
wrt Spec2, Morph is one backend that Spec2 might use to display a
Form,
or Spec2 might display the Form using a GTK widget.
cheers -ben
