Diff in Pier

An integrated diff viewer for Pier is long overdue. The latest development version of Pier has a first implementation with a simple GUI. The implementation is not perfect, but it already starts to be quite useful for the engineering course here at the university.

Test Coverage of Pier and Magritte

I submitted a simple extension of the SUnit Test Runner to the Pharo Inbox. It accurately determines the test coverage of a selected package. For the latest versions of Magritte and Pier I get the following results:

Pier Site Export and Import

Over the past years several people have asked for a simple solution to export and import a Pier site into a different image. Finally this is possible. The following screen-cast demonstrates the basic steps how I export my complete website and import it into a fresh Pier image.

Export the Site

1. Upgrade to the bleeding edge versions of Magritte and Pier. Also ensure that the package Pier-Squeak-Persistency is loaded and up-to-date.
2. Add the Import/Export component to one of your admin pages.
3. Read the instructions and click on Export to generate and download a complete snapshot of your site.

Import the Site

1. Go to a different Pier image.
2. Again, make sure to have the latest code loaded. Also verify that the same plugins are available, otherwise you might run into error messages.
3. Again add the Import/Export component to the site and select the file to import.
4. In the screen-cast I chose to replace the complete kernel with the import. In other situations it might be better to just add the pages to the existing kernel.
5. Depending on your setup you might need to copy external files and/or update the Seaside configuration options.

Pier 1.1

Pier 1.1 is out and available as a Pharo based one-click image, on SqueakMap and Package Universe. It comes with a bunch of bug-fixes and some new features that make the creation of dynamic web sites even simpler. A quick migration guide was posted as well.

Dog Food

Coderspiel mentions Seaside in the article The right tool for the slob:

And freaking Smalltalk programmers—what could possibly be harder to deploy?—host their own site, their "CMS" if you must, for the Seaside web framework. The site isn’t always fast, it’s probably not always running, but at least the framework has the courage to show itself.

There are many more examples:

• Squeak is the official web site for Squeak. The web site is based on SmallWiki running on Squeak.
• SqueakSource is the official source code repository for Squeak. The web application is based on Seaside running on Squeak. The SqueakSource source code is hosted on SqueakSource.
• Seaside-Hosting is a free hosting service for Seaside applications. The web application is based on Seaside running on Squeak. The Seaside-Hosting management interface is hosted on Seaside-Hosting.
• Talking Meta. The post you are reading is displayed to you through the Blog plugin for Pier, a CMS written on top of Seaside running on Squeak. In fact, this very blog was the initiator for this blog’s blog plugin.