Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs released!
Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs is available…. NOW!
http://slbrowserfb.appspot.com interactive installation instructions are at the very bottom (click on “configuration”).
It’s free and open source, licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (both the client and the server). I had originally planned to release this under the MIT license but the Apache License was a better fit for reasons too numerous to name here.
You can try it out right here, just click on one of these classes (if you use a WebKit or Mozilla web browser that is): ByteString, SmallInteger, OrderedCollection. You can move the window around by dragging the title bar, or just let the auto positioning do it’s job which always tries to center the window over the clicked class name while not going over the window/document edges.
If you click on a class name with a web browser not supported by Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs (let’s just call it slbrowserfb or SLBfb), or if you’re viewing the blog post in an RSS reader or on Planet Smalltalk, you are directed to the SLBfb website which then displays the class instead. You can try this by right clicking and choosing “open in new tab” on one of the class names, when doing that the code browser doesn’t open up. This was just a quick hack, there can be done a lot more with the layout by adding a few more interactive/dynamic elements here and there, but I think it’s pretty neat already.
This is only the beginning, at the moment there’s a lot left to be desired although initial reactions were quite positive. Next up is making the window resizable and providing a public API so that you can better integrate it with your blog’s / website’s design and hook into all the events to modify the functionality. I hope that as soon as the design can be easily changed, people will contribute some better looking default designs to the project as I’m not a designer and can only do so much (although IMHO it looks quite good like it is, but taste differs). The design is completely done in CSS 3, no images, so it’s modifiable completely without having to use an image editor.
One last thing and then I’m off. This is the first release so I’m the only one who tested it, aside from the pre-release that was available on Pharocasts. I advise you that if you include this on your website, try it out thoroughly to see if it messes up your website’s design in any way. It shouldn’t, it didn’t in my tests, but I might have missed something. The widget is sandboxed in an iframe so that outside CSS doesn’t mess it’s design up (the pre-release version wasn’t, so Pharocasts’ design changed the fonts used), the CSS is prefixed with slb_ and the JavaScript is namespaced with SLB, so there should be no clashes. JavaScript doesn’t technically have namespace support but there’s a neat trick to tack it on. Also, at the moment if there should be an error when communicating with the database server (timeout, etc.), SLBfb gets stuck. This will be fixed soon, probably tomorrow.
