[General] Coming soon to a browser near you...

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[General] Coming soon to a browser near you...

Dan Ingalls-3
Folks -

I've now spent several hours working on LK without the use of any
other software (pretty much).  We hope to put out a release by the
end of this week that will allow you to do the same.

Here's how it works:

On a server somewhere you place personal copies of the LK source
files.  I actually use Apache on my Mac with the files on my Mac so I
can work away from the Internet.  Doing it this way, I'm only using
what anyone could use on a computer with a browser and no disk and no
other software.

You start up Safari and load up the Lively Kernel (I typically do
development with Config.skipMostExamples = true to make things load
quicker).  Then you go into the development world and in the
directory browser you select the source code files you care about and
use the menu command to open a changeList on each.  This provides a
window for browsing all the class and method definitions in the file
without running up against the limits of LK's current text editor.

Then you make the changes you want and and open a second tab or
window of Safari to try out the new version.  If it crashes, you can
just go back to the first tab that is still running a stable version
and fix what you need to, until things are right.

This cycle can be repeated many times, interrupted only by times that
you manage to take out Safari (rare) or the whole OS (I haven't done
this yet).  When that happens, you will have to get back to some
stable source code and restart the process.  This can require another
text editor :-(.

When you've done what you set out to do, then you use CVS (or your
favorite groupware) to commit your changes to the team shared code
database, and go on to start on the next project.  It's actually the
rudiments of team development, all in LK.  Woo-hoo!

By the way, text is much faster, the browser can now view the actual
source code (ie with comments, and not decompiled), and I'm working
on searches for all senders and implementers of selected messages.

Stay tuned

        - Dan (for the team)


PS:  In case this all seems overly nerdy, the gestalt I am working
toward is that each time you make a change, it becomes a new web page
that you or anyone else can share and experiment with .  In that way
the unit of distribution is the same, whether you're building an
application, fixing a bug in the text editor, or making a Christmas
card.  It's just that there are a few more things to finish between
here and there...