squeak (pharo) + fluidDB + UIBuilder

There hasn't been much activity in my blog last week. That's partly because I was on vacation, but I haven't stopped hacking completely.

For instance, I could finish reading 'Effective Perl Programming', by Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz. A very good book, full of little tricks on how to optimize perl codes, or good practices, or even tipical gotchas perl 'offers' you.

It's a very practical book, and I could apply what I learned from the first minute I started reading it. Thanks to CDamian for giving me this book. If you happen to know me, and you want to read it, just drop me a line.

I've been reading a bit about FluidDB, the new database technology with wiki essence. At GTS (grup de treball Smalltalk (Barcelona smalltalk users group)), we thought it'd be a good idea to write a library to manage fluidDB from squeak. We mostly want to port fxn's perl lib to squeak.

We chose fxn's one because his implication on fluidDB project. It seems to give us more confidence.

Anyway, I had looked at some docs last week and commented some things on gts meeting, and this week, when I returned from holidays, I saw Jose had already written a mini lib to query fluidDB sandbox. For the moment, it's a simple lib that only allows GETting queries, but it's ok for us to get used to fluiddb usage.

When I was trying it, I got tired of modifying the query string, and thought of doing a GUI to ease my work. Then nullPointer's UIBuilder called CLFramework came to my mind. I installed it through monticello, and ran it. No problems so far.

I found a little bug that got fixed immediately (It's great when devs are around at IRC, isn't it? ). Well, and here it is! a fully Barcelona pseudo-application, unifying FluidDB, with some gts work.

The point is that writting a handful of lines, I got something quite pretty and acceptably useful. I also had the oportunity to learn how to make simple GUIs using nullPointer's CLFramework (and spotting a bug) that always adds -Ofun to the journey.

Now the screenshot...


Have fun, and keep hacking my friends.

More to come on fluidDB next week (I hope so)

PS: Ah! When I was trying to fix the bug, I looked at some keyStroke methods, and discovered that cmd-Del ( alt-Del ) closes the foxused window in pharo. It's like Alt-F4 on most win/linux systems. You're welcome