OmniBrowser based UI for Monticello2

This week, I've decided to stop working with ToolBuilder to mock up the graphical interface. As I have some knowledge about OmniBrowser, I chose OB to test ideas.

This revealed to be a really good idea. I don't loose time with low abstractions anymore. OmniBrowser provides me all the necessary abstractions and I can concentrate on the model and the features.

To present my work, I have built a screencast:
http://damien.cassou.free.fr/monticello2/monticello2.ogg

This is encoded in Ogg/Theora which is a free open-source encoding. If you are on Linux, you should be able to play this video without problem. On MacOS, Damien Pollet told me to advertise Perian. I don't know for MS Windows users, but it should be easy.

During the current week, I will continue working on the UI. As soon as I have something ready to use by everyone, I will post an announce on the squeak-dev mailing list.

I have some problems with the MC2 model. I've sent mails to the mailing list but, currently, they prevent me from going much further without answers from Colin and/or Avi.

DomView Weekly Report

My last week was focused on the ACID1 test page.

I still have some problems with the CSS loading algorithm that is why the render is not perfect.
Here a screenshot:

Next week, I will complete this task - I have to:

• Resolve the css loading problem


• Make links clickable


• Display forms elements (here radio buttons)


• Resolve the in line element placement

Weekly update

I have of course done many weekly updates in private, but this is my first post (!) to this blog, so I will give some background as well.

My name is Benjamin Schroeder; I am working on recording Squeak programming sessions for later playback, using Croquet as a foundation. The plan is to start with 2D, rather than trying to figure out appropriate browser/workspace/inspector UIs for use in a 3D Croquet world.

So far, I have had some success recording and playing back simple Croquet interaction sequences, using the standard 3D Croquet simple demo island. There is another recording project at Minnesota; it takes a slightly different approach, but I may switch to using their code at some point if it is publicly available.

The standard Croquet interaction paradigm is 3D. There are 2D "embedded apps", but it is not clear whether these are properly replicated (and hence recordable) or not. Recently, I have been working on replicating simple 2D worlds using Croquet. To that end, I have been stripping down the Croquet "harness" object to reduce its reliance on OpenGL. The act of stripping parts out, while keeping very basic functionality working, has helped me understand more about what happens during a Croquet session.

I now understand how to replicate a single Morph, headless, across a network. I think my next step is to display the Morph inside an owner that converts mouse events to "future" sends, and then to try more complicated morphs. I am told that Tweak works better than Morphic with the synchronization mechanisms used during Croquet replication, and so I will likely switch to Tweak at some point. I have been learning a little about Tweak, but still have much to understand.

New guests from ESUG's SummerTalk projects

SummerTalk is a project sponsored by ESUG similar to Google Summer of Code. While the latter focuses on Open Source projects and is programming-languages agnostic, the former focuses on Smalltalk projects (while keeping the requirements for the work to be under an open-source license).

We've decided to invite the SummerTalk partecipants who are working on Squeak-related projects to join this blog as guest authors. These new guests are Juraj Kubelka, who's working on improving the OmniBrowser framework, and Yuriy Mironenko, who's working on an add-on to Seaside called Sails.

Welcome, guys!

NewCompiler week #5 repport

Until the last week, I was fixing some tests for the decompiler. This week, I am starting to decompile the complete image.
To do that, I take a method compiled with the NewCompiler. I decompile it to an AST and recompile it to a CompiledMethod, then I reinstall the method inside the class.

It is necessary to take a method compiled with the NewCompiler because the NewCompiler does some optimization that the decompiler know.

I do this for all the methods in the image.
This helps to find a lot of bug.
At the beginning I had 37 tests now I have 71 tests.
The decompiler still don't work but only for a few methods.

This week I will finish to fix the decompiler(for the old block).
I also need to decompile with the block closure.
The next things to do will be to implement a primitive for BlockClosure>>value and more generally work on performance.

DomView report

I always worked on clear/box/float displaying. Todd gave me a very usefull link:
a W3C's test page. My objective is to displayed this web page. Its code contains a lot of accepted cases. First I have to obtains the good boxes placement. Next, I will have to
work on colors, borders/paddings/margins - those properties could be specified by several ways.

Currently this test page is not correctly displayed, but I have a start. I am changing my CSS loading algorithm in order to compute size in pixels during this loading. For example: #foo{width:10%}. The css value will be change by the pixel value during the css loading algorithm. Before, values were unchanged - the value was computed in the getter. I will explain this new way advantages in the domView documentation.

OWRTA #6

OK. Sorry guys, but previous problem with PRParagraphs wasn't so simple as I thought. But it's ok now. It works, both pier and creole syntax switches can be used right now in PRMyMultiPage-s. I've integrated switching mechanism deeper than in previous version. Now it works on the PR*Parser->parseText level and doesn't make any PRParagraphs at every syntax switch. Also I've removed PreParser and its structure at all... I believe that this will not be needed anymore. Theoretically there is better performance for now (better than with PreParser at least). Also there is a simple/dummy visiting modification to view/edit modified Document structure with new PR*Syntax structures. It needs to be modified in future. On this week I'm planning to implement Creole syntax.

If you want you can test my multi page at http://kamikaze.seasidehosting.st/ (services->Multi-Syntax testing)

DomView

Last week, I worked on blocks placements: a difficult problem...There are always bugs with 'float' and 'clear' elements.
Images are now correctly displayed (with their good dimensions). This week, i will continue my work on element placement.

Monticello 2 graphical interface

Last week, I've worked on the graphical interface. Colin and Avi had made some experiments but it wasn't really usable. With the new GUI, the user is able to save any package he wants. I'm currently working on the 'loading' part of the GUI.

As soon as I have something basically working, I will make things easy and announce on the mailing list. People will then be able to start playing with Monticello 2.

Next week I won't be able to work on the Google Summer of Code because I'll present Smalltalk, Squeak and Seaside at RMLL/LSM 2007.

OWRTA report

I've finally got a parsed tree with all syntax switches needed. Maybe it's not a perfect algorithm but at least it works. The only problem with that tree is that there is a new paragraph at every syntax switch. When I'll fix that I will work on visitin+accessing stuff to get it working correctly.

Actually there are more frequent (when something is done) reports on my site. See a News section for them http://kamikaze.seasidehosting.st/

Correcting bugs, playing with the MC2 UI

Hi,

another Google SoC week has just finished. During this last week I corrected some bugs with the PackageInfo slice not verifying its content.

Monticello2 has a good test base. The tests are well designed and I will continue enhancing them.

I tried to implement a directory-based repository. I wanted it to be like in MC1. It basically worked, however one file was created for each element in the commit: one file per method, per class, per inst var… I will try again later :-).

I also had some discussions with Colin. Some of my design choices or ideas were not that good. I will continue discussing with him and Avi to avoid a big conflict at the end ; I would prefer their approval on my work.

Currently, I'm working on an MC1 kind of browser. I would like something people familiar with MC1 will be able to use easily.

I would like to announce as soon as possible a working version. I will work on that. This means:

1. A working UI, with basic features
2. Maybe creating a directory-based repository
   

I don't really know how much work is needed to get a basic working UI.

Slowly understanding MC2 design

This week was my last week of internship. I will now start to work fully on MC2. However, I did find some time to enhance the wiki page. I added a page about the merging algorithm and another one about the base classes with a diagram in each page. I also played a bit with the code and find a way to save and load slices. Have a look at the very bottom of the wiki page.

Projects warming up

It looks like our students have started working on their projects for real, after having been busy with finals, defenses etc.

Jerome, even if busy with his finals, has worked on the CSS viewer, named DomView. He worked on the Box Model, and DomView can now display box containers, as shown in the image. During this week, Jerome will work on text styles.

Jerome is documenting his work at http://jeromechauveau.free.fr/soc2007/docs/.

Benjamin is working on a Croquet Controller that logs the messages it receives. He modified one of the built-in controllers to log the messages on the Transcript window, and is now working on a new, custom controller able to store the received messages. During this week he'll try to have his controller replay simple sequences of messages.

Damien has started working on Monticello2, and he wrote a report on his work here.

Oleg will be busy with his finals until today, Tuesday June 19th, and has promised that starting tomorrow he will work hard on his project.

Mathieu has been busy fixing bugs in the BlockClosure decompiler, and will keep working on it during this week. He's also working on integrating the new compiler subsystem with the Refactoring Engine.

Start coding on Monticello 2

I've finally started working on Monticello 2, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007.

Reading the source code of MC2, I found it well written and lots of unit-tests are presents. Colin and Avi are really good developers.

While reading, I refactored and cleaned the code. The resulting packages can be downloaded at http://www.squeaksource.com/Monticello2.

I've also updated the wiki page with links to documentation http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5624.

Playing a bit with the model interfaces, I didn't find a way to load a package previously saved in a file-based repository. It seems the method MDMemo>>getSnapshotFrom: is missing.

It's not clear whether Colin and Avi want to keep their "slicing" model. The "slicing" model is the possibility to store anything to a repository: a method, an instance variable, a class, a package... According to Avi, it seems it was a good idea, but it complicates things a lot. We will have to discuss about that particular problem.

What I plan to do in the following days is to continue reading and enhancing the source code, and find a way to load a slice from a repository.

Status Report

Hi all,

here's a quick report on the status of the five Summer of Code projects.:

- Oleg, Mathieu, Damien and Jerome have been busy with university work, so they couldn't do much work on their SoC projects.

- Benjamin spent the first SoC week exploring the Croquet system and reading its documentation. His plan for this week was to build a simple Controller that can log external Croquet messages sent to it, for later replay.

[My apologies if this message was posted so late, but my laptop died - yet again!]

HTML/CSS Parser

If you want to have more informations about my GSOC project, please visit my blog at: jeromechauveau.free.fr/blogsoc...

Working on Monticello 2

After some discussions with my mentor Stéphane Ducasse, I have decided to improve Monticello 2 (MC2) and make it usable to every squeaker as part of the Google Summer of Code.

I have started by opening a repository on SqueakSource on which I will be able to put my own work. It currently contains the last available versions of MC2 packages.

Then, I sent an email to the Squeak-dev mailing list requesting information about MC2: its design, its state... Colin Putney and Avi Bryant kindly answered, giving details.

I also found old posts on Colin's and Avi's blogs talking about MC2 design.

Finally, I've received a mail from Keith Hodges giving information about the current status of his work on Monticello and what I can do to improve MC2.

The next task I would like to achieve is opening a wiki page on the Squeak Swiki containing all information I can grab about MC2. This pages will also be used as a place for me to write new documentation.

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Seven Days to GSoC start: looking forward and looking back

Next monday will mark the start of the Google Summer of Code 2007: from that day the students will officially start working on their projects (and getting paid, too). But since there's nothing forbidding them to start working earlier, I've just sent our five students an email asking whether they've done anything during this interim period and, in case, what they've done.

While we wait for them to reply, I'd like to look back for a moment to the selection process. Using an agile/XP term, we could call this a little retrospective.

So, what went well with our selection process? First of all, the fact that we had so many student proposal, and most of them came from students sincerely interested in working on/with Squeak, and not just in it for the money. The fact that we had to coordinate with many other GSoC projects in order to select our 5 students is another proff of the level of the students who applied for a Squeak project.
Another thing that I'd like to remark is the level of involvement of our mentors. They all took their job seriously, throughly examining and evaluating all the proposals. Kudos to them!

What could be improved? Personally, I felt that there was a little "creeping" in the mentor and proposal lists. We started with ~10 mentors and 12 proposals on our list, we ended up with 14 mentors and 18 proposals. Freezing the two lists a little earlier can make coordination a little easier.
I'd also like to have more people on the Squeak IRC channel during the whole proposal submission period. This way people coming into #squeak to ask for info will have more opportunities for a correct answer.

What could we experiment with? In the past weeks I was toying with the idea of a Squeak bounties system. If we'd manage to put this or a similar system in place during the autumn, we could also use it for gathering proposals for next year's Summer of Code.
Also, for next year's Summer of Code it would be worth considering positioning Squeak as an umbrella project, managing proposals involving the main Squeak system, Seaside, Squeakland, Sophie, Croquet etc.

These are some of the points I wanted to make. Do you have any comments or any more points to add to the discussion? if so, then the comment form is waiting you!

How to load the NewCompiler

Hi everyone,

I juste want to add a litle tip about how to load the NewCompiler so here is the basic tree dependency:

• NewCompiler


• NewParser


• SmaCC (runtime only if you don't want to compile the parser)


• AST

So in oder to load the NewCompiler you have to fulfill the dependency. You can find them all in Squeaksource.

The next post I will show you how to write bytecode easily.
Let comments if you find it interesting or if you want any tips about the NewCompiler.

NewCompiler ToDo

This last 3 days I have met Marcus at Bern and we discuss about things to do and the way of doing them.

Then here the work to be done:
- The more important things: make the decompiler work so we can propose it to the 3.10/3.11 release team.
- Have 2 parser so we can work on one without breaking it all
- Remove the reference to the RBParser and RBToken
- Clean the interface of the RBNode
- Integrate the continuations from Seaside
- Make debug it work in the debugger
- Profile the compiler to optimize it.
- Create some visitor to have the AST annotations and remove the token
- Work on the VM and new bytecodes/primitives
- ...

Up to now I have look at VMMaker and implement some bytecodes the improve the performance of the method with closures by 6. Those bytecode are experimental and we should propose some more efficient.

We have also change the organization of the NewCompiler. So now we have 3 packages:

- AST: Package for the RBNode and RBToken (which should be removed)
- NewParser: Package containing the parser so you can use it for your purpose without loading the complete compiler. We make this package mostly to make the RefactoringEngine using the SqueakParser so we can remove the RBParser.
- NewCompiler: The closure compiler