demos

The Refactoring Browser is a freely-available reimplementation of the standard Smalltalk system browser that adds several refactorings to the standard operations provided by the browser. It is distributed in the goodies directory of VW3.0. The refactorings that are implemented are fast and safe and have been used successfully on several commercial software projects.

The refactorings range from mundane operations such as adding classes and instance variables, to the complex such as moving a method from one class to another through either an argument or an instance variable. In addition to the refactorings, the Refactoring Browser also provides an auxilliary tool that can detect hard-to-find bugs and common style errors in Smalltalk programs. For instance, it can detect situations when the standard do: iterator was used instead of a more specific one such as select: or collect:.

We will demonstrate the various refactoring techniques by refactoring the running Smalltalk image itself. We will rename Object and the new method to demonstrate the safety of the refactorings.