Morphic (software)

Morphic (software)

The name "Morphic" was taken from the Greek word "morph", its morphs taking on the role of "forms", the basic graphical building blocks in earlier Self systems and in Smalltalk MVC.

Morphic is a direct-manipulation user interface (UI) construction kit based on display trees. A Morphic interface is built out of graphical objects known as morphs (from the Greek word for form or thing), which allow for a great degree of flexibility and dynamicism.

Originally developed by Randy Smith and John Maloney for the Self programming language system, Morphic was ported to Squeak Smalltalk by John Maloney, where it takes the place of the original Model-view-controller (MVC) architecture as default. (MVC is also available within Squeak versions 3.8 and earlier.) Morphic is also used in Lively Kernel, an experimental UI toolkit from Sun Microsystems which is written in JavaScript and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). On a higher abstraction level Morphic is also used in the enterprise performance management toolkit of doCOUNT, based on Ruby on Rails.

The name "Morphic" nowadays is also used in the meaning "allowing for a great degree of flexibility and dynamicism for change".

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