Run Cuis in the Web Browser. (SqueakJS)

CAVEAT. This is very much alpha, don't take it for granted it will run every day ;)

You can run Cuis in the Web browser using SqeuakJS clicking this link : CuisJS
You can see important debugging messages in your browser developer console.
It is not very snappy, be prepared to wait long times.
When you load CuisJS the first time it comes with only the .image and .changes files. To load all the base Cuis directories as Documentation, Features, Core-updates etc. you need to run the following snippet. ATTENTION, this is going to take about 10 minutes to complete.

Feature require: 'CuisJS'. 
CuisJS installDataDirs.

If you Save the image you can then visit CuisJS and have it running with all files and directories in less then 1 minute !
This version of Cuis will be always in sync with Juan repository. If possible I will try to check for updates every 5 minutes.
CuisJS virtual machine is SqueakJS with a few primitives more (just one now). For the moment I will not try to keep in sync with SqueakJS but ideally I will in the future.

How does it work ?

With your browser you load the page: cuis.html. That loads jQuery and SqueakJS, then it runs SqueakJS passing there files:
- Cuis-XXX.image
- Cuis-XXX.changes
- Cuis-XXX.sources
- CuisJS.pck.st . My helper package.
- Compression.pck.st . Needed because I what to decompress stuff coming from the server.
- 'UnsavedChangesTo-Compression-NM.001.cs.st' . A correction to Compression that was not working fine.
I added a primitive to SqueakJS (number 902) to let me load text files from the server. The primitive loads the script primitive-902.js and, on success, calls the function getCuisTextFiles(). Don't be fooled by the name, all the files I load are text files, binary are encoded to Base64. This helped me reduce the amount of code to write.
'CuisJS.pck.st' is a helper package to collect useful functions for CuisJS. It is the only package aware of the new primitives i define, for example.

If updating the repository I can remove 'UnsavedChangesTo-Compression-NM.001.cs.st', Juan uploaded it to Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev.
Load Cuis files and dirs in the same directory where there is the image. Now they are one level below. This could create problems. (mailing Juan 23-Sep-2021).
If a new directory is added into Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev, or its subdirectories, this change will not be automatically reflected in CuisJS, because the directory structure was hardcoded in Javascript file primitive-902.js.
The image version number is hardcoded into the HTML file cuis.html , it requires Nicola manual intervention if the image version number change.
There a way to load files on demand (see maling Vanessa 22-Sep-2010).

Dr. Nicola Mingotti started this page on 19-Sep-2021. I am testing CuisJS in Firefox under Linux mainly.