A software environmentalism story — A few days ago, the governor of New Jersey called explicitly for COBOL programmers to help with the development of the unemployment system during the COVID-19 crisis: This is how the software environmentalism crisis looks like. In the software development industry, we focus almost exclusively on building systems. The…

A story of moldable development — Databases are pervasive in software development, but more often than not, exploring databases is perceived to be different than typical development and it happens outside of the development environment. We think that this is not reasonable and that it should change. A while ago we showed how we can accommodate…

To get to moldable content, the frame must not imply a specific structure for the content. We got to the current tab-based design of Glamorous Toolkit mostly due to the problem of not being able to close a Spotter in a borderless window. …

A story of moldable development — We worked on a way to explain that the need for moldability is pervasive in software development, and we came up with this treemap showing all classes from Glamorous Toolkit grouped in packaged and highlighting in blue the classes that define at least one custom view, and in green those…

A peek behind the graphical stack of Glamorous Toolkit — When one looks at Glamorous Toolkit, it’s the shiny interfaces that capture the attention. It’s less apparent that we chose to build our own graphical stack. Building a graphical stack is not a straightforward decision. It is rather costly, especially for a small team, and it comes with high risks…

A story of moldable development — Nested data structures are ubiquitous in software. Packages, classes and methods are nested. Folders and files are nested. XML elements are nested. Treemaps are useful to highlight occurrences in such nested structures, and they should not miss from a development environment. Glamorous Toolkit offers treemaps, too. This is a behind-the-scene…

New native windows backend. Class Coder. Extended parsing support. — Glamorous Toolkit v.0.6.42 brings with it a new native window backend for Mac, an initial Class Coder, extended parsing support, stability throughout the board and in particular in the debugging department, and a few other things. New native window support The initial native window support we announced two months ago felt great both due…

Elegant and accessible code queries with the Glamorous Toolkit — Search is a pervasive need in software development. Yet, the typical IDE rarely goes beyond a regular expression queries. We must do better than that. One of the design principles behind Glamorous Toolkit is that search must be pervasive. …

This is an example of example-driven development using Glamorous Toolkit. The concrete code snippets are written in Pharo. Examples vs. tests Example-driven development is somewhat similar to test-driven development, but it differs both in how examples are expressed and composed, and in how examples are utilized both for testing and for documentation purposes. …