I’m trying to return to Smalltalk after a 15+ year break (VisualAge, ENfin/2 ST-80 etc), and have been trying to get back into the saddle with Pharo 8 and Pharo 9.

Since I have no legacy code - I’ve opted for Pharo 9 knowing a stable release isn’t far away.

My goal is to produce several applications for private use, and regain some competence in Smalltalk along the way. The apps are business accounting/investing style apps - not too technical. I’m really not keen on the prospect of using any of the other ‘mainstream’ alternatives we have today.

I’m confident I can build a domain model easily enough, but the Pharo environment is my stumbling point - especially building the GUI with Spec2. I’m really spinning my wheels trying to get a useful Spec2 application built.

It needs to have menus, a toolbar, tabbed notebooks, tree lists etc - plus a dozen or so tabular panes (to view/maintain my domain model). Ideally it would also be able to use ODBC or UDBC or Excel etc for transaction storage.

I’ve been through all the building blocks in SpDemo but there a just too many concepts to familiarise with and test bit by bit as I buildup a more realistic functioning application. It has been very frustraing and time consuming.

I understand why there are not yet solid guides available (book, tutorial, examples) , so I thought the best way would be to use an existing Spec2 application to help me get it going. I think this would save me many weeks of effort.

Could anyone point me to at a working non-trivial application that I could share and use a starting point.

Any suggestions to help me get into the heart of my application would be most welcome…!

Hi,
You can check this: https://github.com/jordanmontt/RewriteToolsSet
Hope it helps you.

Regards,
Sebastian

From: mark.odonoghue.2010@gmail.com mark.odonoghue.2010@gmail.com
Sent: 11 May 2021 06:21
To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org pharo-users@lists.pharo.org
Subject: [Pharo-users] Looking for more non-trivial example application based on Spec2 to learn from...

I’m trying to return to Smalltalk after a 15+ year break (VisualAge, ENfin/2 ST-80 etc), and have been trying to get back into the saddle with Pharo 8 and Pharo 9.

Since I have no legacy code - I’ve opted for Pharo 9 knowing a stable release isn’t far away.

My goal is to produce several applications for private use, and regain some competence in Smalltalk along the way. The apps are business accounting/investing style apps - not too technical. I’m really not keen on the prospect of using any of the other ‘mainstream’ alternatives we have today.

I’m confident I can build a domain model easily enough, but the Pharo environment is my stumbling point - especially building the GUI with Spec2. I’m really spinning my wheels trying to get a useful Spec2 application built.

It needs to have menus, a toolbar, tabbed notebooks, tree lists etc - plus a dozen or so tabular panes (to view/maintain my domain model). Ideally it would also be able to use ODBC or UDBC or Excel etc for transaction storage.

I’ve been through all the building blocks in SpDemo but there a just too many concepts to familiarise with and test bit by bit as I buildup a more realistic functioning application. It has been very frustraing and time consuming.

I understand why there are not yet solid guides available (book, tutorial, examples) , so I thought the best way would be to use an existing Spec2 application to help me get it going. I think this would save me many weeks of effort.

Could anyone point me to at a working non-trivial application that I could share and use a starting point.

Any suggestions to help me get into the heart of my application would be most welcome…!

Many thanks Esteban - I will study the code to get a feel for what kinds of approach I would need to use.

It didn’t install properly as you warned - but that’s OK - I only need to peruse the code at this point.

First impressions are that it has a bit of complex detail that handles some of the platform & backend GUI work.

I suppose ideally these would be reworked somewhat so the the Chrono application doesn’t need to deal with any of that stuff?

Nevertheless is is going to be very useful and I thank you for your help :-)

Cheers

Mark

Hi Sebastian

Thanks for providing your application - No problems loading it on Windows 10 .

Your application is pitched at the right level for the GUI work that I need to do. It looks like it will be very useful indeed.

It is also really good to be able to compare it to Esteban’s more complex example,  as I’m sure having both will help me with problem solving and better understanding of the Spec2 framework.

Many thanks :-)

Mark

+1

I'm glad to hear 🙂

From: mark.odonoghue.2010@gmail.com mark.odonoghue.2010@gmail.com
Sent: 11 May 2021 12:35
To: pharo-users@lists.pharo.org pharo-users@lists.pharo.org
Subject: [Pharo-users] Re: Looking for more non-trivial example application based on Spec2 to learn from...

Hi Sebastian

Thanks for providing your application - No problems loading it on Windows 10 .

Your application is pitched at the right level for the GUI work that I need to do. It looks like it will be very useful indeed.

It is also really good to be able to compare it to Esteban’s more complex example, as I’m sure having both will help me with problem solving and better understanding of the Spec2 framework.

Many thanks :-)

Mark