Smalltalk with James Robertson

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at configuring the toolbars in the VA Smalltalk development environment. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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The VA tools have a lot of options on the toolbars, but what if you want more? For instance, what if you really want to be able to open a browser from the workspace? Under Options on the Launcher, pull right at Toolbars:

Select a tool in the menu, then move options to on or off. Be careful with the mouse wheel; it's easy to change the menu when you intend to scroll through options:

Now, open a new workspace after adding the Class Browser icon - you should see your toolbar item:

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, toolbars

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at finding breakpoints that you've set in VA Smalltalk. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

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Sometimes when you are doing development, you end up setting a lot of breakpoints. Afterwards, how do you go about finding them all? In VA, it's pretty easy. Pull down the System menu on the launcher, and go to the Breakpoints pull right:

Select the second option, and you'll see all the breakpoints you have in effect:

From there, you can clear all of them, deactivate them, and explore the code that has them:

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, breakpoints

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at reference finding in Pharo - sometimes, you're not sure why an object won't get gc'd, and it turns out that you can find out what the dependencies look like. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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Technorati Tags: smalltalk, pharo, gc

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at using "Halt Once" in Pharo. Sometimes, putting a halt in code can be problematic - you would like to just hit the halt once. Today's screencast shows you how to do that in Pharo. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, debug, pharo

Today's Smalltalk 4 You starts creating a simple web service in VA Smalltalk. Before you get this far, you'll need to load the required support. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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Today we'll start setting up a Web Service for a simple application. To get started, here's the simple application: a counter application with one variable, and two methods that we want to advertise. If you need to see what code to load first (the basic VA support code for all of this), then watch this screencast first.

Notice that the methods we want to advertise are in the @WS-API category. That's important; the VA tools that generate the XML look for methods in that category. The next thing to note is the following lines in your ini file (abt.ini if you have not changed the name of your image):

The XML stanza in that file tells you where VA will drop (and where it will look for) any XML files used by the Web Services system. To create the XML files we need, use this:

"Generate XML"
SstWSXmlGeneration  forClass: Counter

There are other variations on that where you can specify other options; we'll leave that aside for now. Once you execute that, look in the directory specified in your ini file:

We'll look at those files in detail next time, and go over the changes you'll want to make to the boilerplate before you use them.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, web services

Today's Smalltalk 4 You starts looking at Web Services support in VA Smalltalk. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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Today we'll start looking at how VA Smalltalk supports Web Services. To get started, we'll load the right code in from ENVY:

Move the Web Services library over to the right (a number of packages will show up there), and then load it. That brings in everything you'll need. Next time, we'll start looking at an example. In the meantime, you can try the included tutorial:

WebServicesIn10MinutesExample new open

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, web services

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at a useful window menu in Pharo that's easy to miss - but has a number of useful features on it. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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Technorati Tags: smalltalk, pharo

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the rewrite tools in VA Smalltalk - they come in as part of the refactoring browser support. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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Today we'll look at another one of the interesting tools that comes in with the Mastering ENVY Developer Tools - the rewrite tools (part of the refactoring engine). Specifically, we'll look at code transformation. Using the stock tools, it's easy enough to rename methods, but what if you want to selectively rewrite code within a subset of the applications and classes in the system? On the launcher, open the Rewrite Tool:

To take a simple example, we have a small class in an application that has code like this:

shouldDoThing
	^shouldDoThing isNil
		ifTrue: [shouldDoThing := false]
		ifFalse: [shouldDoThing]

And we would like to change that pattern in this class to:

shouldDoThing
	^shouldDoThing 
		ifNil: [shouldDoThing := false]
		ifNotNil: [shouldDoThing]

Simple enough for one change, but what if there are a number of them in your application - and you don't want to make that change across the entire system?

The matching rules above will do what we want - and you can follow that pattern for any such transformation. Next, we'll limit the scope of our change. Click the "Search In" button:

As we did with Small Lint, select the applications and classes you want to apply the rule to. Then hit the "Ok" Button. You'll see something like the following:

Nothing has been done yet - the system is showing you the proposed changes. You can either select individual changes to apply, or select "Execute All":

If the application(s) affected are not open, you'll get prompted by ENVY (as per usual) to create a scratch edition. Once you approve that, you'll be able to open a browser and see the changes above

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, rewrite, refactor

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the Small Lint tools in VA Smalltalk. These exist in most other Smalltalk implementations as well. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

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It's a good idea to periodically run some "sanity checks" over your code. SUnit tests are one form of that; Small Lint is another. If you load the "Mastering Envy Developer" feature into VA Smalltalk, one of the tools you get access to is Small Lint:

After launching the tool from the VA Launcher, you need to pick applications and classes to run it over. Select one or more applications, and then select one or more classes. You need to use the Add or Add All options in the context menu, which adds a check next to all of the selected items. That will get you to the next step, where you need to decide which lint checks to use:

Select all, or a subset from the menu seen above. Then just run them:

The window that comes up will show you all of the possible issues - and we say "possible", because Lint can be overly aggressive. You can select an issue and browse the specifics in the code you had it check, and then decide whether or not you need to make changes.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk, lint

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at how the Undeclared dictionary works in Pharo. It operates the same way in Squeak, VisualWorks, and ObjectStudio, so you can see the same results in those products. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, pharo, undeclared