Extending the Application Framework

Short Description
an excellent tutorial that is run as a Smalltalk application, and which is invaluable in learning the VisualWorks. application framework and application …

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Content
27 - 1 8/29/04
Copyright . 1996 Alec Sharp
Chapter
27
Extending the Application Framework
The basic VisualWorks ApplicationModel framework is an excellent way to approach building an
application with user interface screens. However, as with most things, it’s possible to extend the framework to make
the development of user-interface oriented applications easier. In particular, Tim Howard has written extensions to
the ApplicationModel framework that he has described in various articles and in a book.
The extensions consists of several new classes: ExtendedApplicationModel, ExtendedSimpleDialog,
DomainObject, DomainAdaptor, and CollectionAdaptor. The code for all these extensions is in the Smalltalk
Archives. It’s worth spending some time looking into using these extensions in your application.
Advantages of the extended framework
If you subclass your applications off ExtendedApplicationModel rather than ApplicationModel, you get a
lot of benefits in terms of cleaner and simpler code. Let’s look at a few of them here.
Simpler code
ExtendedApplicationModel allows you to do everything you could do with ApplicationModel, but makes
much of it a lot easier. Here are some examples written first with ApplicationModel functionality, and second with
ExtendedApplicationModel functionality.
ApplicationModel
(self builder componentAt: #saveAB) enable.
(self builder componentAt: #editAB)…