Timestamp and AbtTimestamp

[jtuchel]

John and Team,

now that we are becoming part of Seaside land, we'll probably see some more people taking a look at VA Smalltalk. They'll have to import their existing Smalltalk code and will surely find alot of little rough edges where incomaptibilities between the dialects come up.

One that should be very easy to solve is providing a class named Timestamp. I am not sure if the solution for this would be to simply register a global #Timestamp for the class AbtTimestamp (just like the String/EsString stuff) or if AbtTimestamp should have a new superclass called Timestamp. I think it would be cleaner to go the superclass path and puch most of AbtTimestamps functionality up to Timestamp. This would have twop benefits:
* Code using AbtTiimestamp won't break
* Imported code will have one problem less than it had.

I know there's DateAndTime and I know it's in the ANSI standard. But people do use Timestamp in other dialects, just as we use AbtTimestamp in ours

So what do others think? Would it be worth the effort? Would it be much effort (I don't think so)?

cu

Joachim

[a3aan]

Hi Joachim,

FWIW, Timestamp has been added to the list of classes not to use in Slime (http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/slime) because of portability issues.

If you want to port an application to VASt, I think there is a lot of value in making the original application more portable first (or at the same time in practice). My impression is that authors of the original application are usually open to this idea. This will not only make the porting easier, but will also make maintaining the port a lot easier.

Cheers,
Adriaan.

[jtuchel]

Adriaan,

I'd like to come back to the Timestamp / AbtTimestamp issue.

I've had a load problem just the other day because both Toothpick and GLORP define a class named Timestamp as subclass of AbtTimestamp.

I can modify Toothpick to use AbtTimestamp, but am a bit too respectful to do it in GLORP

Unfortunately, If I changed GLORP or Toothpick, both of which aren't my code, I'd fork off a VAST version of them. So do you have good advice for me?

Joachim

[a3aan]

Joachim,

My short term solution would be to make a fit for or your own usage. Longer term solution would be trying to convince (or join) the developers of Glorp and Toothpick to use Grease as a compatibility layer.

Cheers,
Adriaan.

[jtuchel]

Adriaan,

that's exactly what I did (partly).

First, I renamed Toothpick's Timestamp class to ToothpickTimestamp - which is not a good solution, but works,
Then I contacted Joseph. Let's see what we can do here.
In case of Toothpick, I think extensions to AbtTimestamp will perfectly do, but I am not sure what implications this would have for portability of Toothpick. So I guess Grease would be a good idea here.

Joachim