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. Its morphs take on the role of "forms", the basic graphical building blocks in earlier Self systems and in Smalltalk MVC.
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".