Squeak World Tour Results

This posting to the Squeak List from Stephane Ducasse describes some of the initial results:

macos.tuwien.ac.at:9009/776242636.asHtml.full

A response from John Sarkela:

Great summary Stephane,

(and profoundest apologies to those who have been patiently awaiting news of the first stop on the tour...)

In addition to the work that Stephane and Joseph have done with respect to menu building and modular specification, some additional refactorings have reduced the number of references to non-existant classes after a shrink.

1. SystemDictionary>>initialize has been refactored so that it does not directly call out class names when the startup and shutdown lists are initialized. Rather each class requiring entries in shutdown or startup list do so in their #initialize methods. Similarly the classes have a #release method that is responsible for degregistering interest in startup and shutdown. The existing ad hoc coding patterns resulted in a method that could not be recompiled after a shrink. (Note well, that we must preserve order of class initialization. Hopefully this is where knowledge of module dependencies will help us to do the right thing.)

2. A couple new classes were added. SessionManager which is responsible for coordinating activities in a running image. Among other things, it is resposible for holding onto the current interface builder. There are now three interface builders, MvcUiBuilder, MorphicUiBuilder and CompositeUiBuilder. The application model classes now defer to the singleton SessionManager to build a UI upon themselves from a specification. This removes all knowledge of MVC and Morphic from the subclasses of StringHolder. (It also holds open the possibility of more esoteric UI's ... emacs anyone? ;-}>

I am working to get these code sets lined up and available for general use. I will send a notice when we have these posted.

John Sarkela

An initial package "XML UI Specs for Morphic and MVC" was posted to the Squeak List on 2/22/01! See groups.yahoo.com/group/squeak/message/24995 To download, see the Squeak Swiki page at minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/guiBuildingTools.

(May 2001) G�ran Hultgren has written a first article describing the prerelease version of Stable Squeak (the Squeak World Tour image), with lots of pictures, and an interview with John Sarkela. See 195.43.243.112:8000/sqworld.1.