Re: [Help-smalltalk] visualgst

[Giuseppe Luigi Punzi]

Lot of news. Congrats.

Then, visualgst can be used in production again?  (Add class, fileout, add 
namespace, senders etc. ...)

Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:

>All,
>
>I spent a pleasant afternoon refactoring and fixing bugs in VisualGST. 
>Diffstat follows:
>
>  73 files changed, 765 insertions(+), 724 deletions(-)
>
>Looks pretty brutal. :-)
>
>Most important changes:
>
>- Fixed recategorization of classes
>
>- Fixed add category.  Now it is not anymore an undoable command, since 
>it's enough to just select another class to effectively undo the 
>command.  This can be changed again later, when DeleteCategory is 
>implemented (but how?)
>
>- Removed UndoableCommand class.  The only interesting method could be 
>moved to UndoCommand.
>
>- Fixed various backtraces on "nothing is selected".  Commands now can 
>refuse to execute, and there are abstract classes ClassCommand, 
>MethodCommand etc. that refuse to execute if there is no selected class, 
>method, etc.  Then, things such as FileoutClassCommand become subclasses 
>of ClassCommand.
>
>- Related to this, all commands now take a browser widget as their 
>target.  You really should not pass classes, namespaces etc. to the 
>commands, as this is the task of the UndoCommands instead.  This was 
>necessary for the implementation of ClassCommand etc.
>
>Anyway, let me say it again.  Commands a) should always decide what to 
>do _only based on the selection in the GUI_, b) are immutable, c) are 
>responsible for checking the validity of the state.   (I think that's 
>already the case for all commands, but didn't really check).
>
>Why?  Because the plan here is to create commands once and for all at 
>browser creation time, and make them more integrated so that they can be 
>connected to the enabling/disabling/showing/hiding of menu item.
>
>Instead, UndoCommands should always decide what to do only based on 
>their contents.  They're also immutable and responsible for checking the 
>validity of the state, but the similarities end here.  If later there is 
>a need, it is possible to change UndoCommand to UndoAction and add an 
>abstract Action class for repeatable but non-undoable actions.  I was 
>almost going to do this today, then decided that maybe we AGNI.
>
>In fact, you could see UndoCommands as an instance of the Command 
>pattern, while Commands mediate between the view (the GTK+ objects) and 
>the controller (the GtkConcreteWidget).  Kudos to Gwen for the design. 
>It was not (and still is not) totally fleshed out, but it's really 
>waiting to come out beatifully.
>
>- Also related to this, I completely redid the implementation of 
>doit/printit/etc.  These now have their own Commands too.  The browser 
>widget has control on the target object and asks the text widget to 
>doit/printit/etc. with the given object.  The typical implementation is
>
>     targetObject [
>          ^something
>     ]
>
>     doIt: anObject [
>          someTextWidget doIt: anObject
>     ]
>
>     doIt [
>         DoItCommand on: self
>     ]
>
>This was necessary to fix DoIt and friends in debuggers and in inspector 
>browsers.  I haven't tested it in the SUnit browser, so doit etc. may be 
>broken there.  Despite the pleasure of the experience I was quite tired, 
>so I decided to stop.  Doits in the debugger are much more important.
>
>- I renamed the VisualGST class to GtkLauncher, since it conflicted with 
>the namespace name.  Declaring the class with the same name as a 
>namespace should really be forbidden.
>
>- On top of this there are a few small "feel" improvements such as 
>providing default buttons in the "Add" dialogs.
>
>
>I already pushed it to the gst repo and to my visualgst fork on github. 
>  Please test it and find bugs.
>
>I don't think I'll have time for more work in fixing the Debian hangs, 
>so I'll try to publish 3.2.1 in a week or two.  It will already have 
>been almost two months since the release.  I don't have plans for 
>opening the development of 3.3 yet, we need some calm.
>
>Gwen, please merge master and stable.  Thanks!
>
>Paolo
>
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