The Home System is a desktop system build on top of Squeak/Smalltalk. It is based upon the idea of storing data in living objects and allowing its users to adapt it completely to their needs. The system comes with:
- Mechanisms to create persistent domain objects in the image
- The global domain object collection soup which allows access to all domain objects
- A basic set of domain objects (e.g. Person, Collaboration, ToDo)
- Ways to store and access arbitrary fields on domain objects
- The Rack for organizing domain objects in a hierarchical structure
The system can be used to accomplish many everyday computing tasks:
Instantiation of existing domain object classes works just like normal object instantiation (e.g. Person new). Note that whenever you create a new instance, this instance is directly persisted and will not be garbage collected.
You can delete such a persisten object by calling delete.
All management methods and the persistence mechanism are contained in the class DomainObject. Any new persistent domain object class must subclass from this class. When creating new domain object classes make sure to not include to many fixed instance variables. Any information which does not define such a domain object (or is not frequently used) might just as well be added as instance-specific fields.
You can access all persistent domain objects through the soup which is a global entry point. The soup provides the interface of a Set. Additionally you can use the search: message to start a simply full-text search on the stored objects.
Beyond that you can also access all persisted instances of a class through the all message (e.g. Person all).
If you did work based on / or build using the Rack and want to write about the work, you can reference the Rack through the reference at the bottom.
inproceedings{Rein2017LYP,
author = {Rein, Patrick and Lincke, Jens and Ramson, Stefan and Mattis, Toni and Hirschfeld, Robert},
title = {Living in Your Programming Environment: Towards an Environment for Exploratory Adaptations of Productivity Tools},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Experience},
series = {PX/17.2},
year = {2017},
isbn = {978-1-4503-5522-3},
location = {Vancouver, BC, Canada},
pages = {17--27},
numpages = {11},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3167108},
doi = {10.1145/3167108},
acmid = {3167108},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {desktop environment, exploratory programming, live programming, productivity tools, programming environment},
}