If you want to experience the power of a concept-centric environment then try out CoBro now! Follow the steps below for a seamless installation. At the bottom of the page you can also download a number of files that accompany the case studies for CoBro.
If you encounter problems you can always contact me.
The current build of CoBro is based on VisualWorks Smalltalk (version 7.6nc). This is a non-commercial Smalltalk environment made freely available by Cincom. You can download this great Smalltalk environment at: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com.
Now that you have Smalltalk on your machine, you should get the latest CoBro bundle. In time we will make this available from the Cincom public repository, but for now you can download the CoBro 2.9 archive file. Only stable builds are released through this website. If you are interested in the latest development build then you should contact me directly.
Optionally you can download graphViz (automated graph layout software) which you can use to visualize concept networks exported from CoBro-NAV.
Unpack the CoBro archive file and start up VisualWorks with a new Smalltalk image. Launch a FileBrowser from within the VisualWorks launcher (File→File Browser) and navigate to the CoBro.pcl file. Right-click on the file and select 'Load'. Loading this file might take a while since it also loads a number of prerequisite packages.
After loading all the prerequisites, a dialog will welcome you to the CoBro system. If this is the first time you installed CoBro then you should first load the core set of concepts which are used by CoBro to ensure its functionality. To do this you should go to the CoBro launcher menu 'System→Preferences'. This will open up a dialog box where you can load three concept sets:
The CoBro environment is ready for use after loading the core set of concepts.
Go to the CoBro launcher menu 'Tools→Concept Hierarchy' which will launch a tool to navigate the concepts that are loaded. Additionally you can open up the examples workspace to test-drive the programmatic access to CoBro. For example execute the following line:
Concepts.Wine smalltalkTemplate