Safara project: results, personal experience and future directions

Hi Squeakers,

The Google Summer of Code period is over and I'd like to spend some words about the project I was involved in, Safara, a text editor for Squeak . The results obtained (from a project and a personal perspective) and what we still need to do is the gist of the post. If you are interested in knowing what Safara is look at squeak-source or in the blog archive.

Results

First the bad news: Safara is not ready to use yet. It needs more
major features (like undo, completion, search/replace, templates) and
it should be a little bit faster (though some steps in that direction
has been already made). Safara is a big and ambitious project so I
expected this situation.

Then the good one: Safara is extensible and easily portable, so the
main goal of the Summer of Code project has been achieved. I am quite
satisfied about the design decision we took. Also the code quality
should be quite good as stated by SLint.

My first true Smalltalk Experience

Safara was the first (real) Smalltalk project I was involved in.
Actually I decided to join the Summer of Code with the Squeak Org.
because I needed an opportunity to improve my Smalltalk skills. You
can never learn a language without writing a big (roughly in terms of
number of lines of code) software. Playing with morphic toy examples,
developing little seaside apps or just copying some examples from a
book can be enough to learn the language and some good code styling
convention but not to really understand how the language can help you
in modeling the problem you want to solve. IMHO.

After three months of full time development with Squeak Smalltalk I
changed my mind about Smalltalk, and maybe Smalltalk changed a little
bit my mind about programming. Maybe now I am a better programmer also
when I develop with another object oriented language.
I was impressed by two aspects.

Smalltalk snippets of code, intended as the real lines of code you
write, are really simple and clear. The consequence is that when you
develop in Smalltalk you put your focus more on the whole design of
the software, and less on the single line of code.

Again, as the syntax rules are simple and the whole environment is
object oriented you have really powerful tools that helps you to code,
as the linter and the refactoring tools.

I also appreaciated the image-based style of development but I was
already used to it, so I got less surprises and I just enjoy my self
playing with inspectors and debuggers, modifying my application when
It is live and running.

Next steps

I have a short to-do list, whose outline follows. We need to run a code
coverage analysis, and write more tests to fix some bugs (mainly
related to command extensions and text presentation). We also need to
refactor the context menu (the one usually triggered by a right
click), in order to allow extensions like completion, spell checking
and so on.

I am still working on Safara but obviously putting less effort than in
the Summer of Code period, as I'd like to bring a new editor to the
Squeak community, or at least an alpha version before Christmas. I
don't want to release too early as I think it can be a bad advertising
for the whole project. After the first release It will be important to
create a community around Safara, with a website, a bug/issue tracker
and so on. At the moment the development mailing list is enough.

So if you are interested in the Safara project stay tuned and look at
the squeak-dev and the squeak-announcements mailing list.