VisualWorks first steps

As I've developed the Scribo-Console, and taking in account that Aida/Web is available on several different Smalltalk's I will try to make the same with the console. An excellent excuse to explore others Smalltalk’s!.

Then, the list of possible ports of Scribo-Console is the following: VisualWorks - Smalltalk/X - Gemstone - ObjectStudio - Dolphin.

I'm not sure if will make all, but at least will try with the Smalltalk’s that run on Linux. Not sure with the others, because I don’t like to work on Windows.

To start I selected VisualWorks, because I give it a try on the past, version 5 if not bad remember, and willing to try it again, being that is from Aida/Web comes.

I started installing VWNC on my Xubuntu desktop and, after a few adjustments, is running ok.

Such adjustments were two:

1. After burn the ISO image on the CD, I needed to copy all the CD contents on the hard disk to make work the installation. Don’t tried much things, simply copied and installed and it worked.

2. The startup script, named VisualNC need to be bash, not csh, then I replaced the first sentence (#!/bin/csh) with this one: #!/bin/bash.

And VWNC started smoothly.

First thing I noticed was the fonts a bit smaller to my current resolution, then I switched to the biggest (from Settings VW itself). And also I set the look and feel to Mac (Is the only way of have one of these here!).

Two things caught my attention: the amazing speed to load, open windows, saving, etc and the superb documentation of VW. I think that any product that play on the major leagues must have complete documentation, and VW have it.

After starting VWNC by first time I saved my own image to not broke the original, and then installed the parcel of Aida/Web. Also I searched something to have the code colored and found RBCodeHighlighting on Environment Enhancements category of Parcel Manager.

Having now a comfortable environment to work in, I started the port. As is a tiny app, on the Squeak version I did the UI on the same main class, with Morphic. Then the challenge here is learn a bit about the UI Painter (When I first tried VW, some years ago, I completed the Walk Through, and now I plan to base the work reading again this doc).

Porting some methods, an important thing I noticed, being that I comes from Squeak with no namespaces in mind, is the need of put the namespace name before the class name, as in the attached image: Swazoo.SwazooServer singleton sites (Thanks Janko by point it).

Well, is time to go back to real work, and wait having a bit of free time to continue playing with VW and the console port!

Aida/Scribo Console

In the way of make Aida/Scribo a bit more user friendly to a non smalltalker user, Janko asked on the Aida list by the development of a little operation console.

I taken the job and developed a Morphic console to operate the basic aspects detaileds on Janko's mail.

The current version of the console permits:

• Start the whole Swazoo Web Server
• Stop the whole Swazoo Web Server
• Start/Stop individual Aida/Scribo sites

To have the console working on your image, you can download it from its repository and make the following changes on SwazooServer class:

• Add the instance method #isServing (under the category testing) with the following content:

^self servers notEmpty

• Add the instance method #watchdogOther empty (on the category private-watchdog)

The console has two different interfaces (another way to show the power of Smalltalk) as you can see on the following pics:

To show it, evaluates: ScriboConsole basicView.





To show it, evaluates:
ScriboConsole fullView.


Enjoy it!

How to change the Aida/Web banner

I'm in the way of use and learn Aida/Web and Scribo and I'm starting using Scribo as wiki.

In this way I need to learn a lot of things, and I will post here some small "how to's" of things that may be useful to other people in the same way as me.

After install all the needed packages in a Squeak image, and having Scribo running, the first thing may be desirable may be to change the Aida banner for an own one.

Then, you need to "save as" such banner and generate a new image of the same size that which you saved, decorate it with your own graphics and then do the following:

1. Evaluate in a workspace on your Aida image:

WebStyle new importImage: 'aidabannergif' from: 'aidabannergif.gif'.

were aidabanner.gif is the name of the graphics file on your image directory and #aidabannergif the name of the method to be created on the WebStyle class under the category imgs.

2. Replace the content of the method #aidaBannerGif of class DefaultWebStyle with the content of the recent created in the step 1 and it's all.

To end, you should delete the method #aidabannergif on class WebStyle to maintain your image as clean as possible.

Of course, this is the quick and dirty method to have things as fast as possible, but the correct way should be create your own webstyle. Surely I will talk about this topic sooner or later.