I am struggling with the same issue in a web apps context. I use many external tools to edit HTML, JS and graphics, so they need to be stored on disk.
My current solution is to keep everything in Git and export Pharo packages to the FileTree format. This works nicely with Git, but of course it is all more complicated than keeping the data inside Pharo. What I'd really find helpful would be if we could mount part of a Pharo image as a file system, so that external apps could just read and save files to the image. Also, it would be nice to be able to use the image itself for (smaller) production databases more reliably. I think we would need something that can save deltas externally when state inside the image changes – like a journaled file system – so that data is kept & restored after an occasional image crash. I think this already works reasonably with code changes in Epicea, but there we restore code manually. cheers Siemen
