Retiring BFAV

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Mar 5 05:05:54 UTC 2005


> BFAV has some cool features, though.  The UI being directly available 
> in Squeak is really nice.  This lets you do a quick "browse code" on a 
> fix/enh changeset, for example.  I think we should try to get this 
> going, one way or another, with Mantis.  One way would be to improve 
> Scamper to the point that it at least supports html tables, then Mantis 
> would probably be usable in Scamper.  Then you could "browse code" etc 
> directly on changeset attachments in Mantis.  Another option would be 
> to write a special Mantis client in Squeak (although that sounds like 
> considerably more work).

An alternative, is to use WWW-mining techniques: download the HTML from
Mantis, parse it, and grovel around looking for the tasty bits.  Here's
some info on how to do this kind of thing from Squeak:


	"How to Mine Web pages"
	http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/1271


Also, here are some student projects which do a lot of this kind of
thing:

	"Cases"
	http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs2340/17

Scan down for "MP3 jukebox" and "Newspaper", both of which snagged
content from the web.


HTML-trawling is effective for web sites that don't change too often,
and it takes less code in Squeak than you'd expect.  (Which was, in fact,
part of the reason for doing it in the above-linked class.  It's really
great seeing students accomplish something they didn't think was in
their grasp!)

-Lex



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