[General] Good News: Canvas Port

Folks -

We have just put together a port of The Lively Kernel that uses the  
Canvas graphics API instead of SVG.  This means potentially better  
browser support and potentially better performance, though neither is  
the case yet.  We hope you will enjoy helping us to debug this port.  
You can find it at...

        http://livelykernel.sunlabs.com/repository/lively-kernel/trunk/source/kernel/expt.xhtml

... but you need to be running the latest WebKit or MineField, or  
possibly Chrome or Safari 4 beta.

Almost all the graphics works@this point, but there is one  
remaining hole in the implementation.  Up to now, we have been using  
the serialization support in the SVG DOM to save Lively state on web  
pages.  In order to save our state without this SVG support, it will  
be necessary to add a serialization / deserialization package that  
uses another mechanism such as, eg, JSON.  This could be a lot of fun  
for one of our braver community members (ahem).

Try it out.

Tell us about problems.

... and have fun!

        - Dan

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009@11:49 PM, Daniel Ingalls <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Folks -
>
> We have just put together a port of The Lively Kernel that uses the
> Canvas graphics API instead of SVG.  This means potentially better

cool :-)

> the serialization support in the SVG DOM to save Lively state on web
> pages.  In order to save our state without this SVG support, it will
> be necessary to add a serialization / deserialization package that
> uses another mechanism such as, eg, JSON.  This could be a lot of fun
> for one of our braver community members (ahem).

To be honest I haven't worked much with Lively, but done a lot of
serialization work ;-)

If not put into SVG anymore, how does state manifest itself in the new version?
Is all state available in the lively objects or would one need to
intercept the Canvas calls to capture the state?
I could image that some state is now in code e.g. by drawing something
with explicit values that are not kept in any variable.

Cheers

Michael

Hi, Michael -

The state of the Lively Kernel is essentially a scene graph, or since you're familiar with Squeak, it's basically a Morphic world.  I believe that all state is accessible in the Morphic tree.

        - Dan