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by James Robertson.
Original Post: VW Complexity?
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There's a thread running in cls on how complex VisualWorks has goten. The basic issue is with packages, parcels, namespaces, and categories - specifically, the intersection of all of them. What bothers people is the sense that they are tossed into the maelstrom in the browser, with no sense of direction on what to do. Here are some of my thoughts on this.
The system browser really isn't that complex. Open up VW 3, open up VW 7.2. Both have 4 paned browsers. The only difference, at first blush, is that the leftmost pane in VW3 shows categories, while in VW7 it shows packages. You can easily look at packages as categories, with some amount of hierarchical capability (Bundles). You don't need to deal with Store; if you pop the context menu on a package, there's a handy publish as parcel option. If you don't want to use Store don't - just save your work in parcel form
Namespaces - here we find something that is, in fact, different - and different from other systems. In Java, for instance, a package and a namespace are unified. Probably the best way to start with VW7 is to adopt a similar stance - once you create a package to organize code in, create a matching namespace for it, and place all code in that package in the matching namespace. Here's where some simple tool support could help; it would be nice if one could implicitly define a default namespace for a package, and have the class creation dialog use that namespace when you defined new classes. This is something we'll be looking at from a usability standpoint
Parcels - I'd suggest that you should never look at the parcel view in the browser, and just stay in package view. Dump to disk from there with Publish as Parcel when you need to save work. This does cause confusion (why is the view there at all then?) - we know this. Over the next release cycle, we intend to unify parcels and packages (from a logical standpoint) so that the two different views no longer exist. We recognize that having the two views is confusing, and intend to eliminate that confusion
Categories - These are a relic from pre Package/Parcel days, and should just be gone. We intend to do this, making the system simpler. There are some voices that would like categories of packages/bundles - that might be something worth doing. What is certain is that a whole separate view for categories should go
The bottom line is, we have introduced a plethora of new categorization and organization schemes since VW3, and we haven't (yet) done a good enough job of unifying these concepts - there are too many ways of looking at the system, and it's hard to tell - especially as a new user - which (if any) is the preferred way of doing so. That's something we'll fix. One thing we do need though, is constructive feedback and criticism. Don't just say that the current views suck - tell us why, and how you would rather view the system. We can't promise that we'll follow any specific suggested path, but feedback from real users of VW will be listened to.
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