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Showing posts with the label smalltalk

Spec - Part II: The Layout

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GUI Development in Pharo Smalltalk using Spec. It covers the layouts and tidies up the Greeter application built in part I.  Last updated: March 2019 Introduction First of all: have you read the first part of this series yet? If not, please do so as we are going to iterate over what was done there. As you recall, the greeter application which was built earlier was fully functional. However, it was not easy on the eye --in other words, it was very ugly. As promised, we will tidy it up in this episode. The Question Of The Ages "What do you want!?" Before setting off on the road of endlessly pushing and pulling widgets around, let's first settle for a target design. For the rest of this episode, we will try to achieve the following design (this design is done in LibreOffice Draw and is not a snapshot from the system): Figure 1 - The target design for this episode Layout Smithing Tools There are about half a dozen of layouts and widgets (which can be used ...

Spec - Part I: The Basics

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GUI Development in Pharo Smalltalk using Spec. It covers the basics concepts and walks you through the building up of a Spec version of the legendary "Hello, world". Last updated: March 2019  Introduction Spec is a UI library for Pharo Smalltalk. Well, to be more precise, Spec is a library for describing UI elements, their properties and their behaviour. Under the hood the output of Spec is fed into a UI framework like Polymorph to draw the widgets on the screen. In this series of tutorial episodes, you will understand its concepts and learn how to use it for your everyday UI programming requirements. Prerequisites For this series we will use Pharo 7.0 (the latest stable version at the time of writing this) and since Spec is already included in Pharo 7.0, you don't need to do anything. Just create a package to put in all the classes that we create -- let's assume My-Spec-Tutorial as the name. The First Window Windows are the primary containers for ot...

A New Platform For Business Application Development

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Anybody who has been involved in developing a business application, has already exhausted the long list of frameworks/libraries in JVM, .NET and Python platforms searching for something that reduces the costs while increases the development speed. However it's almost proved to me that one should seek the answer in less explored/popular platforms. Let's meet Pharo! Introduction Well, the title of this blog entry may be a bit confusing as the platform I'm going to talk about is not "new" at all! In fact, it's been around evolving far more than most of us know and could imagine. As a polyglot programmer, for the past 5 years, I've been trying many different languages and platforms to find one which would help me reach my goal: to write a business application (ERP) which can be run in hosted mode (SaaS) and is easily maintainable; and I had a short list of features/characteristics I was looking for in any of them. Note: I will elaborate on software as a ...