Fabrik

Fabrik is a visual programming integrated development environment implemented in Smalltalk and designed at Apple Computer by Dan Ingalls, Scott Wallace, Yu-Ying Chow, Frank Ludolph, Ken Doyle and others during the mid-1980s. It consists of a kit of computational and graphic user interface components that can be "wired" together to build new components and useful applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrik_(software)

Dan Ingalls: The Fabrik work began with a little spreadsheet I built in SmallTalk in 1980. The rules could be any Smalltalk expression, and you could choose different appropriate views to be used on any given cell. For instance if the rule for a cell computed a Form as a result, you could choose a Form View, and actually see the image dispayed in that cell... Then I came across Dan Kimura's "ShowAndTell Language". This was a system designed for easy access to databases, but it had a rigorous Declarative (timeless) model for its relationship diagrams, and yet it dealt with collections. it is to this work that Fabrik owes its iterators, and the various iteration gateways... Just as I was about to leave Apple I became fascinated with the notion of combining Fabrik with the emergent HyperCard system. It seemed to provide a more intuitive scripting model for Hypercard, and also an ability to extend the widget set abitrarily, while at the same time giving Fabrik a model for storage, seraching and database access. It never happened.


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