[Setools] Re: Enhancement of OB

[Colin Putney]

On Sep 9, 2006, at 3:09 AM, Alexandre Bergel wrote:

> Hello!
>
> Damien and I have been working at ESUG on improving the OB browser.
> We identified two problems:
> 	-the method actionsForNode: has to be overridden whenever one  
> wants to add a new action to a class/method/...

Yup, that's a really big problem.

> 	-OBMethodActor did not exist.

The whole actor approach was fairly awkward, I think.

> I attached a changeset that contains an improvement:
> 	-new actions are defined as a method extension on the actor  
> containing a pragma
> 	-definition of OBMethodActor
>
> We plan to post it in the inbox. What is your opinion ?

Well, I see two issues here.

One is that I've already done a bunch of work to fix the  
#actionsForNode: problem - essentially adapting Romain's services  
work for use in OmniBrowser. I've left the infrastructures for  
Actions in place to avoid breaking existing browsers, but Actors and  
Actions should be deprecated if we're going to move over to services.

Second, I need OmniBrowser to work in Squeak versions prior to 3.9. I  
agree the pagmas are a great way to specify these sorts of  
extensions, but I don't want to depend on support for them in the  
compiler.

> In the meantime we created a project on squeaksource:
> MCHttpRepository
>     location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/OmniBrowserEnhanceme'
>     user: 'ab'
>     password: ''
>
> That contains a testing (pressing Alt-t when a testCase is  
> selected) enh for OB.

I'll try to have a look soon. I've just moved into a new apartment in  
Vancouver, and don't have internet access at home yet, so it might  
take a bit for me to get caught up.

The good news is that OmniBrowser now has a canonical home, which  
it's been missing for a while. All OB contributions should be  
committed to the repository below. I'll be more active in maintaining  
OB now, and work with distribution maintainers who want to bundle OB  
in a Squeak distribution. All my latest OB work is at this  
repository, so you might want to work from the main line of  
development, rather than the 3.9 branch.

MCHttpRepository
     location: 'http://source.wiresong.ca/ob'
     user: ''
     password: ''

Colin