This chapter is a tutorial session that takes you through the steps needed to build a simple application in Dolphin Smalltalk using the Model-View-Presenter framework.
The Dolphin education centre comes with a set of Patterns that will help you with many common programming issues. The patterns have been designed in a hierarchy such that you can choose a suitable entry pattern and this will take you through the steps, and possibly sub-patterns, that are necessary to accomplish a task. In order that you become used to using the patterns, as well as learning how the Dolphin environment hangs together, this tutorial provides links to the various pattern pages at appropriate points. If you follow one of these links, then once you have become familiar with the pattern description you should use your browser's Back button to resume the tutorial at the point you left off.
The task in this tutorial is to produce a simple personal accounts manager which we'll call PersonalMoney. This application will:
The application will have a graphical user interface consisting of shell windows and dialog windows that allow a user to communicate with the account information and invoke account operations. The application will store the account data within the Smalltalk image but also will provide facilities to save and restore this data to and from disk.
We are now ready to start building the application using the Application pattern. The first step is to create a package for the PersonalMoney application using the Dolphin Package Browser.
Choose Tools/Package Browser to open the Package Browser window.
If you do not want to interactively follow this tutorial you can load a sample version of the application from the file Samples\PersonalMoney\PersonalMoney.pac using File/Open.
Otherwise use File/New to create a new package and enter a suitable name, say, PersonalMoney.pac. All of the classes and resources that you create for the PersonalMoney application will be associated with this package which will allow them to be exported from your image and then imported into another image at a later date
Click here to move on to the next section of this tutorial or here to go back to the previous tutorial.