CampSmalltalk: Porting the Refactoring Browser

The Refactoring Browser is perhaps the most significant advance in programming environments in the past few years. The authors (John Brant and Don Roberts) have implemented it for VisualWorks and VisualAge, and a few people have ported it to other versions of Smalltalk. The authors claim it is portable, but people still say it is hard to port, and the ports tend to quickly get out of date.

The purpose of this group is to

port the latest version of the Refactoring Browser to as many versions of Smalltalk as possible
figure out how to make it more portable
figure out a process by which up-to-date versions of it can be implemented on as many platforms as possible without killing John and Don.

Organizer: Don Roberts

Members:

Joseph Pelrine - VA, VW, BMW etc.
Andy Bower
Bob Hartwig - The Squeaker
Blair McGlashan
Tarik Kerroum tarik@objectconnect.com - Smalltalk MT
Peter Kwangjun Suk

Since I have a suite, I suggest we try to work there;-) Joseph Pelrine

Richard A. Harmon harmonra@webname.com

One thing I would really like to see is a reference?/official? version of the Refactoring Browser in SIF. I think there are various ports, but don't know how true the ports are to the official version, and if known bug fixes are applied.

I see the same with T-Gen. I have 5 versions of it for three dialects, and I don't think any two are the same.

SIF Refactoring Browser, SIF T-Gen, etc, only using ANSI messages would be great--and portable, and leave only one version to have to maintain instead of a version for each dialect.

Most of the ports of the RB are based on old versions. That's the problem we would like to fix. Putting it in SIF would not really solve that problem, because there needs to be a process to keep ports up to date. It would help, of course, but only if there are SIF readers for every platform hosting the RB. Similarly, having the RB use only ANSI messages will help only if all the platforms it is on support the ANSI messages. Ralph Johnson

I took a crack at porting the VA application BRParser to Dolphin. I got it filed in and then ran BRParser over the entire Dolphin image, making notes of what the BRParser did not like. I can post the results if someone wants to see them before Camp.

Donald MacQueen

I believe that John has ported the parser and scanner portions to Dolphin already. I'll bug him and see where he's at with it.

Don Roberts

The Dolphin 3.0 port can be found here homepage.ntlworld.com/blairmcg/RB.zip

Blair McGlashan

I've installed it into Dolphin 4. The RBParser package has a change to Symbol class>>findInterned that causes serious errors; otherwise it loads, but I can't seem to get anywhere with it; there doesn't seem to be a RefactoringBrowser class at all ?

Laurent Bossavit, certified Smalltalk newbie

See www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/RefactoringBrowser.htm for details of Donald MacQueen's Refactoring Browser UI for Dolphin Smalltalk 4.0x. The next version of Dolphin will feature integration of the RB refactoring engine into Dolphin's native browsers.