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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Cincom Smalltalk UI/Tools Direction
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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We have no plans at this point to deprecate the existing User Interface tools, or the existing UI framework. We realize that with the length of time it's taken to get Widgetry to production, the policy of doing only minimal fixes to the older tools and UI has been a problem for our customers. Replacing the existing tools with Widgetry versions would amount to further forcing our customers to stand still for the next year or two while that happened. So we have the following focus for Widgetry, Wrapper, and tools:
On Widgetry, we will be looking at the ability to combine both frameworks. This may mean embedding Wrapper canvases in a Widgetry UI, the reverse, or both. That is under investigation, and we are looking for feedback from our user community on the best path forward here
Given how long Widgetry has been under development, and the customer investments in the existing frameworks and tools, we don't believe that a wholesale replacement of the existing tools is in anyone's best interest right now. What you'll see is incremental improvements to the existing tools, including the UI Painter and the associated widget set.
We are supporting Widgetry, but we look at the current release as a first pass, intended primarily to garner feedback from early adopters. We do not expect mature projects to migrate to Widgetry at this point in time, and we don't want to pressure them to do so. We do expect the existing early adopters to send us feedback on what's good, what's bad, and what we need to improve.