About Box

Hi Bruce,

This is my first week in a LONG time too, so good luck!

If you open a Finder (Tools->Finder), and search for "about" (selectors), you will find a bunch of things that respond to "aboutText", like "SystemWindow," and "ComposableModel."

The little drop-down arrow in the upper right of these system windows has an "about" item in the menu, and I just tried adding and aboutText method to the Spec Example "ApplicationWithToolbar" and the about box displayed the text I returned from that method.

I hope that helps, and maybe we'll both be able to figure some things out!

Take care,

Rob

On Apr 10, 2016, at 6:44 PM, Bruce Peaslee <[hidden email]> wrote:

This is my first week with Pharo. I have been moderately successful in learning how things go, but I cannot seem to create a HELP|ABOUT dialog. Pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Also, this default behavior can be reproduced with:

(LongMessageDialogWindow new entryText: 'Hello') open

(well, that doesn't set the title to "About"...)

I just can't figure out how to set the text for non-"long message" dialogs!

Take care,

Rob

On Apr 10, 2016, at 6:44 PM, Bruce Peaslee <[hidden email]> wrote:

This is my first week with Pharo. I have been moderately successful in learning how things go, but I cannot seem to create a HELP|ABOUT dialog. Pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

> On Apr 10, 2016, at 6:44 PM, Bruce Peaslee <[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>
> This is my first week with Pharo. I have been moderately successful in
> learning how things go, but I cannot seem to create a HELP|ABOUT dialog.
> Pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Also my first week with Pharo, and first week with Smalltalk in over 20 years.


On 11 April 2016 at 02:07, Robert J Rothwell <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Also, this default behavior can be reproduced with:
>
> (LongMessageDialogWindow new entryText: 'Hello') open
>
> (well, that doesn't set the title to "About"...)

LongMessageDialogWindow new
    entryText: 'Hello World';
    title: 'About';
    open

I figured this one out by changing the browser to class hierarchy and
walking up through the classes until I found a likely method (title:).

Cheers,
Alistair

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 8:57 AM, Alistair Grant <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> On Apr 10, 2016, at 6:44 PM, Bruce Peaslee <[hidden email]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> This is my first week with Pharo. I have been moderately successful in
>> learning how things go, but I cannot seem to create a HELP|ABOUT dialog.
>> Pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.
>
> Also my first week with Pharo, and first week with Smalltalk in over 20 years.

Congrats !
Tell us what is your experience until now ;-)

--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

Alistair Grant wrote

Also my first week with Pharo, and first week with Smalltalk in over 20 years.

How exciting! Three oldtime Smalltalkers discovering Pharo in a week... and, letting us know :) Welcome.

Hi Serge,

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 09:46:02AM +0200, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 8:57 AM, Alistair Grant <[hidden email]> wrote:
> >
> > Also my first week with Pharo, and first week with Smalltalk in over 20 years.
>
> Congrats !
> Tell us what is your experience until now ;-)

I was the technical lead of a team that programmed with VisualWorks 2.5
for several years in the 90's, porting it to VMS (VAX and Aplha) and
writing a real-time graphical interface for monitoring and controlling
the water distribution in one of the capital cities in Australia
(Brisbane).

The UI allowed users to build a library of widgets from basic shapes,
e.g. valves, pumps, reservoirs, etc.  They could then be built up to
schematics and attached to a real-time database, receiving events
whenever a value changed.  E.g. valves would change shape or colour
depending on whether they were open or closed, alarms would flash, a
pump would show its flow rate, etc.

We tested it receiving up to 1200 events per second (this was in the
days when a 100MHz RISC processor was the best available (from memory)).
All the graphics, event management and query optimisation were in
Smalltalk, the database query execution and event delivery was in C (the
database was in-memory and didn't support any query language, that all
had to be done by the client).

I left the company a year or so later.  I heard that it was replaced
some years after I left, but I'm not sure when that happened.

Cheers,
Alistair

Thank you. I was talking about your experience with Pharo :-)
But your description is nice also.

Regards,

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 8:40 PM, Alistair Grant <[hidden email]> wrote:


--
Serge Stinckwich
UCBN & UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC)
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://www.doesnotunderstand.org/

Welcome!

Stef

Le 11/4/16 20:40, Alistair Grant a écrit :

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 09:02:52PM +0200, Serge Stinckwich wrote:
> Thank you. I was talking about your experience with Pharo :-)
> But your description is nice also.

Ahh, right, sorry about that.

Pharo 5.0 first impressions from someone coming from VW2.5...

I'm already a fan of Smalltalk and its development environment.  I've
only spent a few hours working with Pharo (it's my hobby, with not
nearly as much time as I would like):

* I read the first few chapters of Pharo by Example as an introduction
  to Pharo.
* The browser, debugger and basic inspectors are all familiar enough
  that I was able to work with them without any issues.
* I'm glad that being able to run headless mode is easy, as I'd like to
  use Pharo for scripting.
* The addition of Montacello / Metacello / Gofer and SUnit are the
  biggest improvements I've noticed so far.  I wish I had these 20 years
  ago.
* I've only played with the MessageFlow Browser a little, but I think it
  will be one of my go-to tools.
* I'm still getting used to the idea of the entire ST environment being
  in a single OS window, but at the moment I think I prefer VW's
  approach where each ST window is a OS window, as it makes it easier to
  work with other applications, e.g. if I want to look at an email or
  web page while working within ST.

I only have one suggested improvement so far (assuming it doesn't
already exist and I just haven't found it yet)...  When searching for
packages on SqueakSource / SmalltalkHub etc.  it isn't clear to me how
much confidence I can have in any given package, which is really useful
if there are multiple packages providing similar functionality.

The Arch Linux model seems pretty good to me.  Official packages are in
the core or extra repositories, which matches what is included in the
Pharo image.  The next level is a community repository, which contains
packages maintained by Trusted Users.  General users can be confident
that these packages will be kept up to date.  The last level is the User
Repository (AUR), which anyone can contribute to.  The AUR includes a
comment section and vote count, and general users can add or remove
their vote.

Hope I haven't ruffled too many feathers...

Thanks!
Alistair

On 12-04-16 19:51, Alistair Grant wrote:
> I only have one suggested improvement so far (assuming it doesn't
> already exist and I just haven't found it yet)... When searching for
> packages on SqueakSource / SmalltalkHub etc. it isn't clear to me how
> much confidence I can have in any given package, which is really
> useful if there are multiple packages providing similar functionality.

One of our community tools for that is a continuous integration server:
http://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution. There several of these configurations
are build and tested, often against several Pharo versions. Several Pharo
users are also already using TravisCI and github for that.

Stephan

Le 12/4/16 19:51, Alistair Grant a écrit :
You should have a look at the inspector
Inspect
     Point>>#x to see what I mean and look at the tabs
> * I'm glad that being able to run headless mode is easy, as I'd like to
>    use Pharo for scripting.
Me too. We are starting a new iteration on this. We got a student whose
job is to convert
bash script to pharo and identify problem so if you want to share effort
you are welcome.
In the future you will be able to choose between one window

>
> I only have one suggested improvement so far (assuming it doesn't
> already exist and I just haven't found it yet)...  When searching for
> packages on SqueakSource / SmalltalkHub etc.  it isn't clear to me how
> much confidence I can have in any given package, which is really useful
> if there are multiple packages providing similar functionality.
I hope that soon we will have a package validation in place.
>
> The Arch Linux model seems pretty good to me.  Official packages are in
> the core or extra repositories, which matches what is included in the
> Pharo image.  The next level is a community repository, which contains
> packages maintained by Trusted Users.  General users can be confident
> that these packages will be kept up to date.  The last level is the User
> Repository (AUR), which anyone can contribute to.  The AUR includes a
> comment section and vote count, and general users can add or remove
> their vote.
You get a bit of that in the catalog browser.


>
> Hope I haven't ruffled too many feathers...
>
> Thanks!
> Alistair
>
>

I'd like to see something like this too.

>
> Hope I haven't ruffled too many feathers...
>
> Thanks!
> Alistair
>

Le 13/4/16 06:48, John Pfersich a écrit :
us too
     first you have some pharo extras packages
     second favor package with tests
     third we have been working on quality rules and quality rule false
positive management
     so you can run the tests and run the rules


     now we will start to work on package validation to produce a kind
of "validated" distribution of pharo packages.

Stef

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 09:28:07PM +0200, stepharo wrote:
> Le 12/4/16 19:51, Alistair Grant a écrit :
> > * I'm glad that being able to run headless mode is easy, as I'd like to
> >    use Pharo for scripting.
> Me too. We are starting a new iteration on this. We got a student whose job
> is to convert
> bash script to pharo and identify problem so if you want to share effort you
> are welcome.


I'd be happy to, thanks.  Please let me know what I need to do to get
involved (and remember that this is my hobby and I don't get as much
time as I'd like, so my responses won't always be as fast as we'd like).

Thanks!
Alistair

P.S. I'm still putting together my response to all the other comments in
this thread.

>
> I'd be happy to, thanks.  Please let me know what I need to do to get
> involved (and remember that this is my hobby and I don't get as much
> time as I'd like, so my responses won't always be as fast as we'd like).

- start to see if you can write the scripts you want.
- identify missing functionality
- use OSSubprocess

> Thanks!
> Alistair
>
> P.S. I'm still putting together my response to all the other comments in
> this thread.
>
>

Combining several replies in to one...

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 08:37:30PM +0200, Stephan Eggermont wrote:

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 09:28:07PM +0200, stepharo wrote:



On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 08:06:26AM +0200, stepharo wrote:

Thanks to everyone for their replies and welcome messages.

It looks like I need to learn more about:

* The catalogue browser
* Montacello / git integration
* Finding the automated tests for a given package

Between that and the improvements mentioned above we seem to be in
pretty good shape.  I still like the idea of a vote button as it gives a
rough indication of usefulness / popularity.  Of course I should
actually contribute some code instead of just pontificating...

Thanks!
Alistair

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 05:55:22PM +0200, stepharo wrote:
> >
> > I'd be happy to, thanks.  Please let me know what I need to do to get
> > involved (and remember that this is my hobby and I don't get as much
> > time as I'd like, so my responses won't always be as fast as we'd like).
>
> - start to see if you can write the scripts you want.
> - identify missing functionality
> - use OSSubprocess

Sure...

While the existing "st" handler has some uses, I think it will be a bit
limited as I expect that most of the scripts I would write would end up
being:

1. Load required packages
2. Maybe do some initialisation
3. Send (basically) a single message to start the real work

Which means that I have to maintain a separate file that adds little
value.

As implied above, I'd like the "script" to be distributable as either
one or two files and take advantage of:

* OO design
* Pharo's excellent development environment
* SUnit

I've hacked together a quick framework in which a "script" is actually a
a Monticello package.  The package name is supplied on the command line
along with some pre-defined options and anything else required by the
script.  The package is loaded and a message sent to the class of the
same name.  E.g.:

pharo script.image cliscript WorkedHours Hours.xlsx

would load ConfigurationOfWorkedHours, load the package, and
send WorkedHours>>runWithHandler: theCliHandler.  (The example script
then reads the Hours spreadsheet and calculates the total hours worked).

Current help text...

> ./pharo script.image cliscript --help
CliScript enables running "Monticello" scripts.

The script is identified by its package name.  CliScript looks for a
configuration package with the same name in the local package cache,
loads it, and sends the runWithHandler: message to the class with the
same name.

Command line parameters:

  packageName  The package to load and execute.

Command line options:

  --debug  Halt at the start of the message
  --log-transcript  Redirect transcript output to transcript.log



I haven't had to use OSSubprocess yet, next steps include:

* Read XSLX spreadsheets instead of having to export to CSV.
  The script mostly does date and time calculations, I need to confirm
  that they are working properly in Tabular.
* Add logging (I haven't looked for any logging capability yet).
* Ideally, implement the ODS support in the Tabular package (stretch
  goal :-)).


Thanks!
Alistair

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 1:51 AM, Alistair Grant <[hidden email]> wrote:

> * I'm glad that being able to run headless mode is easy, as I'd like to
>   use Pharo for scripting.

I'm not sure of its status, but Coral was some experiments along this line...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLb_rMcNN6k

> * I'm still getting used to the idea of the entire ST environment being
>   in a single OS window, but at the moment I think I prefer VW's
>   approach where each ST window is a OS window, as it makes it easier to
>   work with other applications, e.g. if I want to look at an email or
>   web page while working within ST.

This will become more possible over time as some native window
management is being moved out of VM into the Image.

cheers -ben