Snowman 0.7.0 ⛄

This release is the seventh non-experimental release of Snowman, a static site generator for SPARQL backends. This release comes with much-awaited support for caching of non-SPARQL HTTP requests. Under the hood, the cache command and cache-related flags have been overhauled. In addition to all the work on caching, something as fundamental as our RDF library was also rewritten.

Since the template functions get_remote and get_remote_with_config were released we have seen all kinds of cool integrations and work. Cultural heritage institutions have built IIIF integrations, Wikimedians has integrated Wikitext fetching and rendering, people have built interactive maps and graphs by fetching vector and tabular data, and people have even used these features to build data aggregators on top of DCAT. By bringing cache support to these functions on pair with the cache support of other Snowman features users who depend on these features will enjoy faster and hardened builds.

Features and changes 🎈

Breaking changes ⚠️

• The cache command has been overhauled. For migration paths see: #110
• the build --cache flag has been deprecated in favor of --cache-sparql. It will be removed in a future release.

CLI 🛠

• snowman cache has been replaced with snowman cache sparql and comes with a new syntax. #96
• You can now pass a custom .snowman location to the build and cache commands. This makes it possible to share cache across work trees. #106
• snowman cache resources is a new command for managing non-SPARQL HTTP cache.

Template functions 🛠

• get_remote and get_remote_with_config should cache results. #91

Documentation 📄

• The documentation has migrated from the README to the Snowman Manual.

Bug fixes 🪲

• Fixed an issue where Snowman would panic if views.yaml referenced an undefined SPARQL variable. #83

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.

Roadmap and Snowman 0.8.0 🗺

0.7.0 was a major update and with big underlying changes, 0.8.0 can be expected to be a smaller update with a focus on leftovers from this update and smaller features.

Following 0.8.0 we expect one update to focus on experimental support for embedding the Snowman's SPARQL-client and template engine in Go-applications #105. Another update is expected to focus on the developer experience with snowman watch #70 and the ability to pin a Snowman project to a Snowman version #108.

Discuss 💬

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