Soek

The site soek.goodies.st gives access to the sources of open-source Smalltalk libraries and frameworks. A big advantage to developers is that they can explore Smalltalk classes without having to successfully load them into one of the Smalltalk dialect platforms. Recently, I have changed much of the Smalltalk generator and HTML/Javascript generated code.

Formerly, all Smalltalk source was highlighted using a client-side Javascript library. This resulted in long page loading times because it had to iterate through all DOM elements and replace the HTML content by a post-processing (using regex) result. Current version of Soek uses a highlighter written in Smalltalk that can pre-process all class source files.

Soek is a Smalltalk application that provides a different way to navigate through documentation and source code of a Smalltalk library. Instead of the classic multi-list browser view in an image, Soek offers a flat view on all methods and classes and is build using the Seaside Web framework.

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I discovered this way of publishing a framework when I worked with Rails and did most of my searches on Railsbrain.com. Not only I could easily find a particular class or method, it also showed me similar methods, other implementations, classes and their sources. The learning effect was great and it became my standard search tool and recommendation to others.