GT Spotter at the ESUG 2015 Innovation Technology Awards 

GT Spotter, the novel Pharo search interface, just entered the ESUG 2015 Innovation Technology Awards competition.

GT Spotter is part of the Glamorous Toolkit project and it offers an elegantly uniform search interface for any objects, including classes, packages, methods, senders, files, playground pages, examples, projects, and even your custom objects. It can be easily extended, currently featuring more than 100 such extensions.

Here is the original trailer:

And an updated overview slideshow:

Let’s talk about code reading (teaser slideshow)

The emergent nature of software systems (slideshow)

This slideshow offers a visual argument, based on the System Attraction visualization, of how software systems have emergent structures.

This slideshow strengthens the argument I made previously that the evolution of software architecture is a complex game, and it offers the motivation for why the daily assessment process is needed in practice.

Moose 5.1

We are happy to announce version 5.1 of the Moose Suite:
http://moosetechnology.org/#install

Description

This is a minor release. The key highlights are:

• It is based on Pharo 4.0.
• Roassal2 comes with several new builder, most notably the new Mondrian builder (RTMondrian) and the chart drawing engine (RTGrapher).
• GTSpotter has preview abilities and was extended for multiple search use cases including the navigation through Moose models.
• GTPlayground was extended with sharing possibilities and transparent backup.
• GTExample now offers support for documenting classes with example instances.
• Moose Finder and GTInspector come with more custom presentations.
• PetitParser has seen performance corrections and has been extended with the ability to parse whitespace languages.

Installation

The Moose Suite 5.1 comes for each platform as a separate bundle:

• Moose Suite 5.1 for Mac
• Moose Suite 5.1 for Windows
• Moose Suite 5.1 for Linux

The Moose Suite 5.1 can also be loaded in a Pharo 4.0 image either from the Configuration Browser, or by executing the following script:

Gofer new
   smalltalkhubUser: 'Moose' project: 'Moose';
   configuration;
   loadStable

Enjoy,
The Moose team

Guiding a rename effort with GTInspector

After a debate on the Pharo mailing list, we ended up choosing to rename all variations of the example* pragmas to gtExample*. Furthermore, as a second step, we also wanted all methods annotated with gtExample* to start with an example prefix because this would not conflict with the behavior from the code browser.

With this occasion, we also decided to go through the list manually to review. This is not a terribly complicated issue except that we are talking about some couple of hundred methods scattered through dozens of classes.

Having to affect multiple pieces of code scattered throughout the system is not an atypical software development problem, and I find it odd at how little support there exists in typical IDEs for something like this. So, how do you keep track of something like this in Pharo?

Here is a variation of a script that we used to keep track of the second step of renaming the method names:

(Object withAllSubclasses flatCollectAsSet: [ :each |
     (Pragma allNamed: #gtExample in: each) ,
     (Pragma allNamed: #gtExample: in: each) ,
     (Pragma allNamed: #gtExampleFrom: in: each) ])
     select: [ :each | each selector beginsWith: 'example' ]

Inspecting the result in the inspector, reveals a small query-scoped browser that allows you to focus only on the task at hand and know precisely when you are finished.

This solution is terribly inexpensive. Essentially, it is a short query combined with some object inspection. The code involved is minimal, too. This is possible exactly because we turned the concept of an IDE on its head, and as a consequence many use cases that are otherwise seen as the exclusive realm of dedicated tools can be handled with compositions of modular and small ones.