ESUG 2011, Edinburgh

1. Magritte Magic
Thursday, 25 August 11

2. Who we are
• Nick Ager
• Esteban Lorenzano
• No, we are not the creators of Magritte or
experts.
• Lukas created it (and is the unique
expert).
• But we use it a lot, and we love it.
Thursday, 25 August 11

3. Magritte
• A meta-model for describing adaptive
models.
• Generic. Can be realised in Seaside,
Morphic, Cocoa/touch widgets, etc...
Thursday, 25 August 11

4. Describe once,
get everywhere
• Introspection • Object persistency
• Reflection
• Object indexing
• Documentation
• Object setup
• Viewer building
• Object verification
• Editor building
• Object adaption
• Report building
• Data validation • Object customization
• Query processing • and much more
Thursday, 25 August 11

5. Describe once,
get everywhere
• Introspection • Object persistency
• Reflection
• Object indexing
• Documentation
• Object setup
• Viewer building
• Object verification
• Editor building
• Object adaption
• Report building
• Data validation • Object customization
• Query processing • and much more
Thursday, 25 August 11

6. Magritte
• Describe...
• ...any class,
• ...their attributes
• ...relationships
• ...some kind of “type”
• ...accessing and optionally other properties
(anyone you need)
Thursday, 25 August 11

7. Describing models
• Descriptions
• String, Number, Date, etc.
• OneToOne, OneToMany, etc.
• Accessors
• Selector, Pluggable, Chain, etc.
• Mementos
Thursday, 25 August 11

8. So... what to do with all those descriptions?
Thursday, 25 August 11

9. “The model”
Thursday, 25 August 11

10. Interpreting descriptions
• Creating editors
• complex validations
• cancel/save (using mementos)
• Building custom interpretations
• Describing non-visual models
Thursday, 25 August 11

11. Edit anything (1)
• #asComponent
• addValidation
• addForm: #()
• Custom component renderers
Thursday, 25 August 11

12. Demo
Thursday, 25 August 11

13. Edit anything (2)
• We saw Magritte-Seaside
• There is also Magritte-Morph
• And you can build your own
• Magritte-Reef
Thursday, 25 August 11

14. Demo
Thursday, 25 August 11

15. Build your own
renderer
• You can create your own look and feel and
behaviours
Thursday, 25 August 11

16. Demo
Thursday, 25 August 11

17. Describe and use
• The idea is to use magritte description
capabilities to create unique, non-common,
non-reusable, behaviors
• But still have the power of using a
description (validation, etc.)
Thursday, 25 August 11

18. We don’t have a demo for this,
you have to believe us :)
Thursday, 25 August 11

19. Describe anything
• JSON/XML
• Magritte-Glorp (DBXTalk: see talk
tomorrow)
• Magritte-UML (just an idea)
Thursday, 25 August 11

20. Demo
Thursday, 25 August 11

21. Problems
• Where do I place my descriptions?
• Not everything can be described-then-
transformed as I want
• for instance, not everything can be a
“master-detail” and still be useful, but is
hard to build a different implementation
(not impossible, just hard)
Thursday, 25 August 11

22. Magritte Issues
• Name collision with #description
• Cache-invalidation
• dynamic descriptions:
• instance specific descriptions
• context dependent descriptions
Thursday, 25 August 11

23. Solutions
• rename #description to
#magritteDescription
• move descriptions to instance-side
• Use <magritte>
Thursday, 25 August 11

24. Further information
• Seaside Book: http://book.seaside.st/book/
advanced/magritte
• Lukas's site: http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/
smalltalk/magritte
• mail list: <smallwiki@iam.unibe.ch>
• Esteban’s Reef talk on Friday
Thursday, 25 August 11

25. Questions?
Thursday, 25 August 11