[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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