0.1.0

Snowman 0.1.0

This release is the first non-experimental release of Snowman, a static site generator for SPARQL backends.

Snowman's templating system comes with RDF and SPARQL tailored functions and features and takes its data from SPARQL queries. Snowman is designed to allow RDF-based projects to use SPARQL in the user-facing parts of their stack, even at scale. While Snowman today drops the "experimental" warning it's already in use and powers both projects rendering simple SKOS vocabularies as well as projects rendering complex knowledge bases.

Installing Snowman

Download the binary for your OS/architecture, rename it to "snowman", and place it in a directory on your path. Alternatively, place it in your project folder and execute it with the ./ prefix.

We provide binaries for six architectures/operation systems, if none of these are suitable for you you can build it from source. If you think we should provide pre-built binaries for additional platforms consider raising an issue.

Getting started with Snowman

The Snowman README contains a tutorial-like introduction to Snowman. There are also several example projects available:

• Wikidata - an example using Wikidata's public SPARQL endpoint
• Advanced static - an example showcasing how to work with static files
• Sitemap - an example rendering a sitemap
• Non-HTML content - an example of rendering JSON content
• Inline queries - an example showcasing how to issue SPARQL queries from within templates

Known issues

• View templates using layouts inherit block values 🐛 #8
• snowman server does not print an error message when the server port is already in use 🐛 #22

Roadmap and Snowman 0.2.0

Snowman 0.2.0 focuses on developer experience. Some highlights include:

• Add a template function that can convert data to JSON #20
• snowman cache should be able to invalidate unused cache items #5
• Snowman should print a warning when it overwrites files #19

Snowman 0.2.0 milestone.

This release does not mean that Snowman is stable it does however mean that one will have consistent releases to which one can pin their projects. Breaking changes will be announced at least one version ahead of the change.

Discuss

You can discuss this release or other aspects of Snowman in the forum.