Pharocasts: Display Picasa photos

Though it's been a couple of weeks since CampSmalltalk London, I've only just got round to creating a ConfigurationOfCampSmalltalkLondon which can be used to download the beginners tutorial Tim Mackinnon and I created. 

First some context. The beginners tutorial ran on the first day. We had 9 developers with a mixed background in Ruby/Java/C#/PHP etc. We started by going through the excellent ProfStef tutorial which we used as jump off point for frequent asides into the tools and code in Pharo.

Next we gave them a simple exercise. You can download the code by grabbing ConfigurationOfCampSmalltalkLondon from http://www.squeaksource.com/MetacelloRepository.html and executing:

(ConfigurationOfCampSmalltalkLondon project version: '1.0') load.

The aim was to put into practice some of the concepts they'd learnt in the ProfStef tutorial - initially focusing on loops. The tutorial grabs live traffic information from the SE of the UK. Initially there is only one entry in the list viewable from their image at: http://localhost:8080/camp-smalltalk-london

The first task was to change the code in CSLTransportInfo>>renderPage: to loop over the results and pass them to a custom renderer. Note we wanted to pass-on the joy of developing a web app in Smalltalk - the liveliness of the environment, code editing in the debugger etc - without first having to learn Seaside. So we hid the Seaside code behind some custom renderers.

The second task was the change the renderer in CSLTransportInfo>>modelRenderer to be a CSLListItemRenderer. The task here was to notice the signature of the addItem method had changed and use the inspector and the browser to discover the relevant accessors on the result items. 

Finally they changed the renderer again for a CSLMapRenderer and went through a similar routine to step two, though this time the result of their labours was to transform a boring list into an impressive map - graphically  showing traffic incidents.

Those who were more advanced could then filter the results to look at say only incidents along particular roads etc.

The tutorial session seemed to be well received. I don't know if anyone out there is planning to run an introduction to Smalltalk - if so they are more than welcome to use the code.