SCG Pier migration

The SCG website is an instance of Pier, a CMS implemented in Squeak Smalltalk. Although it was once cutting edge technology, it is now a piece of legacy software, running on an old Smalltalk image and vm. There is a high risk that after a future operating system upgrade, the vm will no longer work.

This project will assess the feasibility of the automated migration of the SCG Pier installation to a more modern CMS, or possibly to a static web site. The project will entail:

• setting up a clone of the SCG web site for experimentation
• the selection of a suitable target platform (the standard unibe CMS, or possibly other alternatives)
• a feasibility study to assess different migration paths (e.g., translation from the generated HTML; generation of new web pages from within the Pier image; exporting data from Pier and translating from the snapshot)
• assessment of automated translation technologies
• test infrastructure to ensure consistency of migrated pages
• migration of special web services (e.g., SCG bibliography and automated news feed)
• redirection, if needed, of important URLs

The goal is to arrive at a completely automated migration procedure that can be run at a suitable point in the near future. This project would be most suitable for a Bachelors thesis.

For details please contact Oscar Nierstrasz