[ANN] StarBrowser for Squeak

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Nov 14 09:02:59 UTC 2002


http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~wuyts/StarBrowser/index.html


On jeudi, novembre 14, 2002, at 04:18  am, Ned Konz wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) 
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
  "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
  different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today
  might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes





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