Soup for Squeak
19 January, 2009
Zulq Alam has been working on Soup, a Squeak port of Beautiful Soup, the tolerant HTML/XML parser written in Python, which is extremely useful when you need to scrape data from a web page. He has recently announced a working release and gave some example of its usage.
Zulq notes that there’s still plenty of work to do on this port:
- No attempt is made to deal with different character sets and encodings.
- The parser will not convert entity or char references.
- The parser will not accept options such as whether to convert entities, which entities to convert, what to parse, etc.
- The parser will only do HTML; there are no configurations for other XML flavours yet.
He adds that the project repository is globally writable, and he looks forward to your feedback and contributions.
Squeak goes to Mars
8 January, 2009
Esteban Lorenzano gave Squeakers on Mac OS X a nice little Christmas present to see out 2008, with the release of Mars, an MVC framework for Squeak built using Cocoa. Mars is a plugin, and will run in any fork of Squeak, and as you can see above, is integrated with OmniBrowser.
Esteban notes that one of his main objectives in developing Mars is to keep it small and simple, in order to allow it to be executed in small environments such as the iPhone, (using John McIntosh’s new VM and Edgar de Cleene’s SqueakLightII minimal images).
Mars is MIT licensed, and can be downloaded from the Mars homepage, which also has posts following the progress of Esteban’s work. Esteban adds that Mars is still in the pre-alpha stage, and he looks forward to bug reports, feature requests, comments, and of course, code.
