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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:

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:

Query Engine for Pier

I have been visiting Stéphane Ducasse at the University Savoie in Annecy, France. A few minutes before we left for the Seaside presentation in Geneva, I had the chance to have a look at the presentation of some student projects. The most interesting project built a powerful query engine for Pier working hand-in-hand with the meta descriptions available through Magritte. The tool they present is very similar to what you have in the search of Apple Finder or the way you specify smart playlists in iTunes.