On Smalltalk

Just a quick notification that I’ve updated my squeak image. I do this occasionally to keep my base up to date with the latest and greatest of the frameworks I use.

In this update I sharing my current 3.9 image. It’s based on Damien Cassou’s Squeak Dev Image, an awesome base image with all the necessary goodies a developer needs. Of course I’ve loaded up my window customizations and preferences, nicer looking fonts, and have all the preferences set the way I like.

This image includes PostgreSQL drivers and Glorp, since I’m now doing some development with them and consider them part of my base tool set. If my image isn’t to your liking, I highly recommend learning to build and maintain your own using Damien’s as a starting point. It will save you a lot of time, and he’s done an awesome job building and sharing these images. Thanks Damien.

Tags: Smalltalk, Sql, Updates

Just a quick notification that I’ve updated my squeak image. I do this occasionally to keep my base up to date with the latest and greatest of the frameworks I use.

In this update I loaded Albatross, a great new testing framework for Seaside that lets you write SUnit Tests against Seaside apps like this little test for the blog I built in a previous post…

testAddPost
    | body |
    body := Random sentenceMaxWords: 200.
    browser
        click: 'New Post';
        enter: Random sentence for: 'Title:';
        enter: body for: 'Body:';
        click: 'Save'.
    self assert: (browser textExists: body)

This test automates the browser just like Ruby’s Watir or Selenium so all your Ajax code will be tested, but IMHO, has a much nicer test API, thanks to Smalltalk.

I also fixed a bug in the refactoring browser in my image that was causing a DNU on renaming a method. I fixed up my two refactoring additions to the browser for creating accessors with Magritte descriptors on the class side. The collaboration accessor now produces simpler and more useable code, I removed some unnecessary experimental code I was generating and forgot to take out. Made a couple small changes to my garbageCollect method to be compatible with 3.9, and finally, I updated all libraries to the current versions I’m using in my own development and production images.

I’m still using a 3.8.1 image, but I’ll probably be upgrading to 3.9 soon, I’ve got a working image that contains my enhancements, which took a bit of hacking and merging to get going.

I use a custom port of Monticello and rely heavily on its dependency mechanism to properly load dependent packages. The default mechanism doesn’t work correctly IMHO, and I haven’t yet had the time to tackle learning Monticello configurations, nor have I found any good documentation on it. The version of Monticello in 3.9 is different from 3.8, and not as good IMHO. I can no longer see my dependencies because the packages no long have tree controls listing the dependencies. The tool bar is messed up and gets huge when you maximize a window, a side effect of some changes in ToolBuilder I think, but I could be wrong.

The KeyBinder can no longer be configured to use right click to edit key bindings because right clicking now brings up some other menu globally. Now I have to deal with the KeyBinder popping up every time I accidentally hover over it, an annoyance but something I can live with.

I hacked through a broken installer and got Andreas’s Win32 Native fonts working, which to me, is the one thing that really makes Squeak feel right and usable. A couple hacks to SystemWindow to get the border width down to a reasonable 2px and a few more to fix those annoying floating corner grips which get out of whack when you mess with the border width.

All in all, I’m a bit annoyed by 3.9, but I want to be able to use Traits, Göran’s namespaces, and Pragmas, so I’m going to have to bit the bullet and upgrade soon. When I do, and have a good working image done my style, I’ll post it here.

Tags: Magritte, Ruby, Seaside, Smalltalk, Updates