Morph is the superinterface of all biomorph instances.
A biomorph has four basic ingredients:
Genome - a data structure which determine the makeup of the biomorph,
typically a collection of "genes", numbers inside the computer.- Phenotype - a data structure representing the body of the biomorph,
such as a collection of line segments or other drawing primitives, represented in
a device-independent way.
- Pedigree - a data structure representing the family tree relationship between
the morph and other morphs derived from mutation from it, as well as the parent morph
from which it is derived.
- Image - a device-dependent representation of the biomorph's body, as drawn for
a particular graphical user interface. Image is of type java.lang.Object, so an instance
of any Java class can be assigned to it.
A biomorph may wish to notify other objects when one of its attributes are updated: for
that reason, the Morph interface supports the "bound JavaBeans" design pattern for notifying
interested objects of changes to its attributes, via the addPropertyChangeListener() and
removePropertyChangeListener() methods. Methods which wish to force the biomorph to
notify its listeners of changes may call the firePropertyChange() method, which sends
a PropertyChangeEvent to interested listeners.