[ANN] Alternative view of a system browser

I believe that the traditional SystemBrowser of Smalltalk of old has
been made unusable by the amount of code (and structure) you find in
today's Smalltalk images.

So this is to show you an alternative, a different way to browse through
packages / classes and methods and code. This is Spec-based.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/ic_fRnBXXdyqbiJ5NRP9YtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

What is missing / targeted ?
* Drag and drop reorganisation of the tree as preferred / or as package
/ category reuse.
* A good search facility in the tree. It is already keyboard navigation
friendly (since the tree view is).
* Most / All menu methods of a complete System Browser. I'm planning on
reusing the OmniBrowser command structure as much as possible (to make
it faster).
* Funny ideas on how to use the tree structure : group / selection
display, queries, metrics ...
** There is probably a lot more to be done here, but it would probably
require Mondrian or other graph visualisation tools.

Expect the code sometime by the end of the week, in a Pharo 2.0 / Pharo
1.4 version.

Thierry
--
Thierry Goubier
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Laboratoire des Fondations des Systèmes Temps Réel Embarqués
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I do not have a connection to look at it.
But I LOVE the idea. I love the idea that we can prototype fast new tools and rethink how processes….
Spec is one way to enable that. For example I love the GlamourInspector and it would be great to rewrite it with Spec.
Thanks a lot.
Stef

On Jul 17, 2012, at 3:12 PM, Goubier Thierry wrote:

Hi, nice work. Looking forward to play with it.
Is it similar to the Newspeak browser? Where methods expand in place.

Fernando


On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Stéphane Ducasse
<[hidden email]> wrote:

We will have almost exactly that browser, very soon in Pharo :)
I built an internal FileSystem which eventually will be used for
versioning. Using the standard FileBrowser from Pharo on the internal
FS delivers a very similar experience (albeit less code focused) as
your example :)


On 2012-07-21, at 08:55, Fernando Olivero wrote:

Le 21/07/2012 08:55, Fernando Olivero a écrit :
> Hi, nice work. Looking forward to play with it.
> Is it similar to the Newspeak browser? Where methods expand in place.
>
> Fernando

No, not with the methods expanding in place. But yes, when looking at
the tree.

At the moment, it tries to answer two needs :

A high level view of the overall system, down to as much detail you'd
like (i.e. methods), but while still staying compact (overall view). And
with a hierarchical organisation you can customize.

A simple UI, so that you can play with multiple browsers at the same
time (hence see multiple methods at the same time, that is two or three).

I tried to look into a more advanced design, where I would be able to
use the whole Pharo background image as the class tree, but I lack the
correct data representation to make use of that (and it involves a bit
more implementation effort). It would have looked this way :

* A single graph / tree for the entire image, layed on the world morph,
wher you can open / close subsets.

* A few (3-5) simple morphs windows / editors with the look of a
workspace, showing just the code of a method / a class, triggered by
double-clicking on one item of the graph/tree.

But the normal, treeMorph layout, is more vertical than horizontal, and
would have not made good use of the screen real estate; also because
when you look at the code organisation, it's not very deep : I've found
only :
* group of packages
* package
* Class category
* Class
* Class side of class
* Method protocol
* Method
Which is only 7 deep at worst.

I think this approach could be tried with a different representation,
maybe using Mondrian? But at the same time, the tree morph is very
powerful because it's very easy when doing keyboard navigation.

Thierry


--
Thierry Goubier
CEA list
Laboratoire des Fondations des Systèmes Temps Réel Embarqués
91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex
France
Phone/Fax: +33 (0) 1 69 08 32 92 / 83 95

Le 22/07/2012 18:22, Camillo Bruni a écrit :
> We will have almost exactly that browser, very soon in Pharo :)
> I built an internal FileSystem which eventually will be used for
> versioning. Using the standard FileBrowser from Pharo on the internal
> FS delivers a very similar experience (albeit less code focused) as
> your example :)

Yes, I believed it could very well. After all, this is the very same
kind of organisation (tree-based).

It could offer code sharing opportunities.

Thierry
--
Thierry Goubier
CEA list
Laboratoire des Fondations des Systèmes Temps Réel Embarqués
91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex
France
Phone/Fax: +33 (0) 1 69 08 32 92 / 83 95