Brea

A simple dynamic distributed web site generator for public & open data, combining:

• Backend: Fossil for resilient and distributed storage of information .
• Front-end:
  • Material Design Lite: for responsive, beauty and mobile friendly web user interface.
  • Mustache: a logic-less HTML template system to inject data into web interfaces.
  • Markdeep: for agile and structured light documentation.
• Middleware: Teapot: for defining behavior, data models and connecting front-end and backend.

This is the documentation and issues repository. The source code repository is hosted in SmalltalkHub.

To start run this code from Pharo 6.1:

Metacello new 
	smalltalkhubUser: 'Offray' project: 'Brea'; 
	configuration: 'Brea'; 
	load.

For further instructions and documentation the recommended way to proceed is by downloading, reading and executing the Brea Grafoscopio interactive notebook (you will need to have Grafoscopio installed and to know how to use it).

The name came out as part of a friends joke, talking about how brea (pitch) allows the easy creation and preservation of fossils. This is the current incarnation of an old project prototyped with the excellent web2py, but this time with the advantages of Pharo ecosystem, particularly live coding.

Why two source code repositories?

We split the repositories in two because the Fossil powered one is well suited for files and tickets, while the SmalltalkHub one is best suited for Smalltalk source code. For historical reasons, different Smalltalk communities developed and hosted their source code there, which gives them the autonomy of a simple and self-contained DVCS, that was wrote in the language they knew. That was before the popularity of DVCS advanced by Git and GitHub, and now most projects are being migrated to GitHub to get more visibility and improve collaboration (SmalltalkHub uses an simple optimistic versioning system that is showing its age), while sacrificing autonomy, simplicity and self-containment. We think that Fossil as a back end could provide the advantages of a modern DVCS, while keeping the properties we like to have regarding autonomy, simplicity and self-containment. At some point we hope that the work is being done in the Git/GitHub front to migrate source code from Smalltalk would be useful to host a single Fossil repository containing software and documentation (and issues for both). Meanwhile, we will split them in the ones mentioned before.