Guilty! I use projects a lot to organise my work and like Herbert typically layout several before entering one. I was aware of some sort of "fence" mechanism but always neglected to look deeper because that side of projects seemed to be getting increasingly abandoned. Very happy to see them now getting some love :-) From my POV it would great to have more tools for managing projects, especially in a hierarchy. I remember doing something for Etoys a year or two back so I will dig it out sometime and see if it is still relevant.
-D
Andreas Raab wrote:
Folks -
I always felt that one of the least used "big ideas" in Squeak is that of projects. Projects are incredibly powerful but have often been severely misunderstood. A Project in Squeak can define an entire environment (MVC, Morphic, Tweak), it can be a modification to an existing environment, it can identify a set of tools to be used in some context and more.
The progress that we've made with refactoring of class Project makes it feasible to illustrate the power of projects. If you install the attached change set in an updated trunk image, you will find a new type of project available - a GamesProject. When you choose this type of project you will notice that it downloads and installs the MorphicGames package that Edgar just announced (thanks Edgar!), sets up the environment with a set of games before launching into it. (note that I didn't go as far as setting up the menu bar with games, removing the tools, sealing the programmer facilities etc. but all of this is possible and should be considered for the various types of projects)
And of course, when we ship the next image, we could actually include a number of such "proto projects" like the GamesProject - it takes a tiny amount of space but makes it very accessible and very visible from an user point of view. As a conseqence, we can hopefully ship the next Squeak version with (proto-)Games, Etoys, VMMaker, Seaside and whatnot projects.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
- Andreas