ESUG 2007 Update
Here are the slides and the paper I presented at the research track of ESUG 2007 yesterday. The Pier award proposal presentation ended up as a demo, so no slides to share with you here.
2007
ESUG 2007 in Lugano
ESUG 2007 started yesterday with Camp Smalltalk. It is a great atmosphere to program in pairs or to discuss the latest news around Smalltalk and other programming languages.
Demo of Seaside Halos
Philippe Marschall and I added an interactive example of the halos to seaside.st. In case you have never developed with Seaside this is well worth to try. How easier can it get to interact with a web application while developing?
Process Browser
After showing that it is possible to write a debugger with the OmniBrowser framework, the next missing tool is the Process Browser:
New Seaside Web Site
We finally put the new web site of Seaside online. The official announcement:
Pier Wiki Editor Enhancement
Having a Wiki syntax in Pier makes it very efficient to author and edit content. The Pier Wiki syntax is backward compatible to the syntax of the Squeak Wiki, however it has evolved mostly unnoticed in the past few years. To change that and to make it easier for you to write content I published a Javascript powered edit toolbar:
Linux Days Geneva
I will give a Seaside presentation at the Linux Days - Rencontres Open Source et Logiciels Libres in Geneva. My talk is scheduled Tuesday, 22 Mai at eleven o'clock. After the lunch break Stéphane Ducasse will give a presentation on Squeak, the open source Smalltalk where Seaside and a lot of other cool things are developed in. Stéphane Ducasse is the one responsible for dragging me into the whole thing ;-)
An OmniBrowser Debugger?
The Squeak debugger (1396 lines of code) is hard to understand and impossible to extend. The OmniBrowser framework is powerful and enables one to build extensible meta-driven browsers. Yesterday evening I thought that it would be the time to bring the two things together:
Extending the Pier Parser
Early versions of Pier included the syntax to embed Smalltalk code into a page. This was a nice feature for power users, but caused certain confusion among others. Moreover it also caused potential security issues, when the permissions weren't setup properly. Never the less, as there were some people complaining about the missing feature, I am going to show how to extend Pier and its pluggable parser to support this functionality.
The New Pier Parser
The latest version of Pier introduces a new Wiki parser: The previous parser was built using SmaCC and it dates back to the very early versions of SmallWiki. The new parser is hand-written. This might look like a big step back, however there were several compelling reasons not to use an EBNF based parser anymore: