6.11: Chapter Summary
- Page ID
- 38010
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In order to develop effectively with Squeak, it is important to invest some effort into learning the tools available in the environment.
- The standard system browser is your main interface for browsing existing class categories, classes, method protocols and methods, and for defining new ones. The system browser offers several useful buttons to directly jump to senders or implementors of a message, versions of a method, and so on.
- There exist several different class browsers (such as the OmniBrowser and the Refactoring Browser), and several specialized browsers (such as the hierarchy browser) which provide different views of classes and methods.
- From any of the tools, you can highlight the name of a class or a method and immediately jump to a browser by using the keyboard shortcut CMD–b.
- You can also browse the Smalltalk system programmatically by sending messages to
SystemNavigation default. - Monticello is a tool for exporting, importing, versioning and sharing packages of classes and methods. A Monticello package consists of a system category, subcategories, and related methods protocols in other categories.
- The inspector and the explorer are two tools that are useful for exploring and interacting with live objects in your image. You can even inspect tools by blue-clicking to bring up their morphic halo and selecting the debug handle.
- The debugger is a tool that not only lets you inspect the run-time stack of your program when an error is raised, but it also enables you to interact with all of the objects of your application, including the source code. In many cases you can modify your source code from the debugger and continue executing. The debugger is especially effective as a tool to support test-first development in tandem with SUnit (Chapter 7).
- The process browser lets you monitor, query and interact with the processes current running in your image.
- The method finder and the message names browser are two tools for locating methods. The first is more useful when you are not sure of the name, but you know the expected behaviour. The second offers a more advanced browsing interface when you know at least a fragment of the name.
- Change sets are automatically generated logs of all changes to the source code of your image. They have largely been superseded by Monticello as a means to store and exchange versions of your source code, but are still useful, especially for recovering from catastrophic failures, however rare these may be.
- The file list browser is a tool for browsing the file system. It also allows you to
fileinsource code from the file system. - In case your image crashes before you could save it or backup your source code with Monticello, you can always recover your most recent changes using a change list browser. You can then select the changes you want to replay and file them into the most recent copy of your image.