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st4u

ST 4U 73: Exploring VA Browsers

April 22, 2011 10:08:32.140

Today's Smalltalk 4 You takes an overview look at the browser set in VA Smalltalk (omitting the ENVY specific ones - we'll go through those in a separate tutorial). If you prefer a written walkthrough to video, then skip down to 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:

VA Browsers

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Today we'll take a look at some of the different kinds of browsers in VA Smalltalk, and what they are used for. This is an overview; we'll be going into more depth in other tutorials. Go to the launcher, and pull down the tools menu, and select Browse Classes

Class Browser

You should see something like this pop up:

Browse Class

That's the class browser; we'll put that aside and pull down the tools menu again, selecting Browse Senders. You'll get prompted for a selector; enter at:

Browsing Senders

This brings up a browser on all of the senders of the message #at: - there are a lot of them. Let's put that aside, and find all of the implementors of #at:

Browsing Senders

Let's push that aside and look for all of the implementors - pull down the tools menu again and select Browse Implementors:

Browsing Implementors

Enter at: again, and you should see this:

Browsing Senders

This browser looks a lot like the previous one, it's just focused on the implementations rather than the invocations. Let's move along to references - what if you want to find all of the places that a class, Global, or class variable are used? Pull down the tools menu again, and select Browse References. Enter something like Processor:

Browsing References

You'll get a browser that looks like this:

Browsing References

More often, you'll want to browse a specific class - pull down the tools menu again, and select Browse Class - I entered Collection:

Browse Class

Browse Class

There's another browsing option in VA that's not common in Smalltalk - Browse Categor, which is again available from the tools menu:

Browse Category

Try entering Printing:

Browse Category

And that wraps up a quick tour of the various browsers - leaving the version control related ones aside, which we'll cover in depth in a separate tutorial.

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

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posted by James Robertson

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