[ANN] StarBrowser for Squeak
Ned Konz
ned at bike-nomad.com
Thu Nov 14 03:18:35 UTC 2002
On Wednesday 13 November 2002 05:27 pm, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> Roel Wuyts <roel.wuyts at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
> after requests from several people at the ESUG event in Douai and
> at OOPSLA, I decided to spend my airplane time wisely and implement
> a first version of the StarBrowser for Squeak :-)
>
> For the benefit of people who have been marking exams or for
> whatever other reason haven't been keeping up with things, what
> *is* StarBrowser and what could it do for a Squeaker?
Roel's Star Browser has a tree down the left side and an open area at
the right side.
Under the root of the tree are categories. Roel classifies these (as I
recall) into "intentional" and "extentional" (sp?).
One type of category is populated by executing code (which you can
specify).
The other type of category lets you manually drag or otherwise add
items.
Roel will probably come up with a merged kind of category: one that is
initially populated by executing code, but can have things added to
it manually.
The categories can contain anything: classes, metaclasses, methods,
objects, other categories... and each different kind of thing in the
categories can have its own verbs. For instance, at OOPSLA he showed
some slides; these slides were Images and he'd added a default action
to show the slide on the right side of the browser.
For each node in the tree, there are various verbs that can be
applied. These are specified by writing code (he uses a Visitor
pattern to do this extension). They appear in menus and buttons.
For each kind of item, there is a default action which applies when
you click on it. Typically, for instance, the "edit" verb would be
the default for a method. So when you clicked on the method in the
tree, you'd get an editor opened on that method.
The advantages that I see are:
* easily extensible. For instance, we could quickly make a SqueakMap
browser out of it.
* manages and displays categories that are meaningful to the user. The
stock class/method categories are rather inflexible, and don't allow
one item to be in multiple categories. But we don't think in trees,
generally.
--
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
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