[ANN] Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs
Hi, I released the first public version of "Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs" (or just SLBfb since that name is really long.. ^^), a JavaScript widget that you can put on your blog (or any other kind of website) to offer your readers a web based Smalltalk code browser for classes you mention or even describe in an article or tutorial so that people don't need to have a Smalltalk image at hand to understand what you're talking about. The widget pops up when someone clicks on a classname and can be moved freely around a website, but it tries to position itself automatically in the best position when you don't move it by yourself and keeps doing so even when the web browser is resized. The widget downloads the source code of a class from a database over the net. At the moment the database has all 3093 classes of Pharo 1.1 in it and more Smalltalks (where code redistribution is allowed) are going to come soon, including some popular frameworks and libraries like Seaside. The only requirement to add this to a blog is that you can add custom JavaScript to your blog's template, you don't need a blog that runs on Smalltalk/Seaside for this, which means most free blog services work fine (including Tumblr and Blogger). I hope this will be of help to the Smalltalk community. It's completely free and Open Source, licensed under the thoroughly permissive Apache License Version 2.0 (both the widget and the database/website). I'm running this on Google App Engine and the free quota (bandwidth, database space, CPU time, etc.) should be enough to serve the whole Smalltalk community, or at least that's the idea. You can try it out directly on the SLBfb website: http://slbrowserfb.appspot.com or in my blog post about the release: http://smalltalklabs.tumblr.com/post/1557829586/smalltalk-labs-browser-for-b... If you scroll to the very bottom of the website, there's a link "configuration" which will bring you to the interactive installation documentation to install this on your own blog/website. Keep in mind that this is the first release (apart from the pre-release on Pharocasts some time ago), so there could be some nasty bugs that only happen when there's a full moon and someone tries to sing a ballad on one leg with his arms tied behind his back. This only works in WebKit and Mozilla browsers at the moment, but for unsupported browsers or when you read a blog post that makes use of SLBfb in an RSS reader or on Planet Smalltalk/Squeak, a website is used to display the classes mentioned instead, so it still works but not as nicely. If someone wants to hack on the code, I'll release a screencast about how to set up a local development environment some time next week, including a small introduction on using the git version control system since the code is hosted on Github. Cheers, Chris -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/ANN-Smalltalk-Labs-Browser-for-blogs-tp3041451p3041451... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:09 PM, HaiColon <haicolon@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I released the first public version of "Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs" (or just SLBfb since that name is really long.. ^^), a JavaScript widget that you can put on your blog (or any other kind of website) to offer your readers a web based Smalltalk code browser for classes you mention or even describe in an article or tutorial so that people don't need to have a Smalltalk image at hand to understand what you're talking about. The widget pops up when someone clicks on a classname and can be moved freely around a website, but it tries to position itself automatically in the best position when you don't move it by yourself and keeps doing so even when the web browser is resized.
Licensing issues aside (I don't really care much, though I understand the concerns on both sides), this looks extremely slick and cool. Thank you, James
Hi James, glad you like SLBfb :) I hope it gets popular. It would be so funny if yet again other languages would copy from Smalltalk and you'd begin to see code browsers popping up on websites targeting the users of other languages ^^ It might even make it easier for people to switch to Smalltalk or Newspeak, since then they've already gotten used to the idea of a code browser instead of a flat text file for source code. But that's wishful thinking of course, not going to happen. Feel free to send me any suggestions for improvement or new features you might have. There are already a lot of things planned that I want to do with SLBfb and areas were I plan to look for a better solution, but it's always good to get more input from other people :) Cheers, Chris On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 10:33 PM, James Ashley <james.ashley@gmail.com>wrote:
Licensing issues aside (I don't really care much, though I understand the concerns on both sides), this looks extremely slick and cool.
participants (3)
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Christoph Budzinski -
HaiColon -
James Ashley