Thousands of contextual tools?
Programming, exploring data, browsing APIs, knowledge management, log investigations, domain modeling are all part of the same continuum. They require dedicated tools that can come to you in an integrated experience that is specific to your system. This is the essence of Moldable Development. And this is what Glamorous Toolkit makes practical.
(The first two minutes has poor sound quality, but it's still worth it ;))
A single environment. Many use cases
Glamorous Toolkit is the Moldable Development environment made out of visual and interactive operators that can be combined inexpensively in many ways.
API exploration
Discover and browse API data
Software analysis
Explore your code from many perspectives
Data exploration
Unearth patterns in data through visualization
DevOps investigations
Analyze logs and system behavior
System documentation
Make the system tell its stories
System specific editors
Create context-aware editing experiences
Domain discovery
Explore scenarios through executable examples
Explaining a domain object through examples and contextual views.
An interactive exploration of dependencies between ActiveRecords in a Rails application that also shows the Ruby and SQL sources.
Exploring a REST API through contextual views.
Investigating the logs of a failing Jenkins continuous delivery job.
Exploring the data exported from a Twitter account.
Exploring the book about Glamorous Toolkit written in Glamorous Toolkit.
Editing a AT Protocol lexicon definition at the domain level: highlighting of name strings, completion inside JSON strings, navigation from a reference to its definition.
How to start?
Download and run.
To exploit Glamorous Toolkit, you have to program it. To learn how to program it, first learn how to learn inside the environment.
Then pick a problem you care about and work your way through it.
Get startedMade to work with many languages and technologies
Glamorous Toolkit is implemented in Pharo and Rust but it was designed to be extended for other technologies and languages. It can be used to analyze various sources such as Java, C#, Ruby/Rails, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React or COBOL. And it can be used to work with various runtimes like GraphQL, Python, JavaScript or Gemstone.
Editing GraphQL and exploring a server response from a Lepiter page.
Explaining a tokenization algorithm implemented in Python.
A dedicated environment for defining support for other languages.
Exploring COBOL screens, control flows and source code.
So, what exactly is Moldable Development again?
Moldable Development is a way of programming through contextual tools built for each problem.
The premise of Moldable Development is that there is no single perspective on a system that is correct. There are always many, and different parts of the system are best shown differently. These shapes summarize the system from specific perspectives. This then leads to a compressed communication and a new feedback loop.
Glamorous Toolkit itself is an extensive case study of how contextual tools enhance programming abilities. It comes out of the box with thousands of extensions and examples that touch on the whole system.
The goal? To make the inside of systems explainable.
The need for moldability is pervasive. The treemap shows the classes of Glamorous Toolkit organized in packages. Blue denotes classes that contain at least one contextual view; green shows those that have an example.