Tuesday, September 22, 2009

UGP / SecureSqueak 0.1 released

Download from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/securesqueak/
Or watch the video: http://vimeo.com/6698843.

This is the first release of my "Unnamed Grand Project". It includes the SecureSqueak kernel (kind of), SiteBrowser, Subcanvas and the DPON object replication framework. Currently the "SecureSqueak kernel" is just the Squeak 3.10 kernel converted to use namespaces. Version 0.2 of UGP will start introducing security into it.

This release is for show and tell only; it barely works and isn't at all secure.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Subcanvas, with windows!


...and they actually work, too! The yellow parts are the borders; you can drag them around, and clicking on them brings them to the front.

The Subcanvas API is starting to prove that it really can work. The yellow bits are a subcanvas. Each of those contains a subcanvas with the window contents. The background is a subcanvas. The buttons (grey things with text) are subcanvases and will pop up a brand new window when you click on them.

Next up: choose better colours and make the test sites actually do something.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Subcanvas: Introducing Easels

Last night I started writing a real test for my Subcanvas graphics/events architecture: a trivial windowing system as the humble beginnings of a SiteBrowser [A SiteBrowser lets you browse "Sites" across the Internet, similar to navigating between Projects in Squeak]. The first problem I encountered was: from ordinary application code, how do I add a subcanvas? You aren't meant to hold references to canvases in your code, and the method to add a canvas is Canvas>>addCanvas. That would mean that you can only add a canvas from within an event handler. Oops. I needed to refactor the API to make it less brain-dead.

As a result, I introduce the Easel, an object which specifies the structure of Canvases and their children. An Easel is an object that your code should hold a reference to, and its API contains all the methods used to add, remove, move, resize, raise and lower subcanvases. I've also moved the canvas handler accessing methods to it, and added a method to cause a redraw event on a canvas.

I'll be updating http://gulik.pbwiki.com/Canvas soon.