Gettings Started

Greetings,

I am assuming I will find a FAQ somewhere, but I am interested in
developing worlds.  I am a computer scientists/network engineer at U
Wisconsin and would like to play around with existing worlds as well.
I do not yet know squeak and smalltalk, I am working on that.  I am
also really old school as a programmer, mostly PERL, C, Expect and
other procedural languages.

I downloaded croquet onto a couple of my machines but have been unable
to find any shared spaces.  The U Minnesota list of places to go is
not avaiilable to me, I went to a shared space and connected but the
world was empty.  I've heard of virtual museums but cannot find any.

Is there a google like function for this?  If not, I'd like to make a
google world where people can connect, see portals to the 5 most
recently entered worlds and see a browser they can type search terms
and have it open a portal.  Sort of like stargate meets google.  I
figure it will help people who are looking to interact for whatever
reason find other users currently online.

I've been learning objective C under OSX (using Xcode) and I am hoping
those skills will transfer into coding for this, we shall see.

Any advice on getting started would be greatly appreciated,

Janet

Janet,

Good to see a fellow badger on the list!  I did my undergrad there.  Great place.  Not as great as Minnesota... but close. ;)

A good place to start on Croquet is my University of Missouri Colleague Matt Schmidt's Blog.

http://xaverse.blogspot.com/

And this list.

You'll find the documentation that exists to be a bit optimistic.  As a 10 year enterprise java developer myself, the first big revelation was that, although the tool kit "appears" to be like an IDE;  It is, in fact not.  Think of it as an object oriented version of notepad. 

Good luck!

Thanks,

Sean




--
Sean P. Goggins
http://www.goggins.com

``Design is what you do when you don't [yet] know what you are doing.''
-- George Stiny, Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

"What you need to invent is an imagination and a pile of junk."
-- Thomas Edison

http://www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/history.html

Hi Janet,

There is no open Croquet "application", but rather an SDK with  
various demos. These illustrate different features and technologies,  
including different ways to connect with others. Thus it is kind of  
hard to provide a single uniform place for people to connect through.  
The listing at U. Minnesota is a prototype of how such a system might  
work, not a robust open service.

Most of the demos illustrate various LAN capabilities, including  
automatic discovery on the LAN. The only demo in the SDK that has the  
BEGINNINGS of tuning for WAN operation is the "KAT" demo. In most  
cases, trying to connect over the Internet from random locations  
around the world would not be very satisfying, performance-wise,  
unless using the KAT or something later.

I think it would be a fine idea to extend the KAT slightly to  
register a world automatically with a service like the one at Minnesota.

I left UW just under six months ago, although the DoIT router for the  
the forerunner of the that demo was shut down a while before that.  
The non-profit Collaborative for Croquet that I am part of does run  
an open router at Madison's Supranet. Note that you must use the  
current version to connect to it, which is a little more recent than  
the SDK. http://opencroquet.org/index.php/Croquet_Collaborative

I'd be happy to swing by and demo or answer questions. Just contact  
me directly.

On Nov 17, 2007, at 11:37 AM, Janet Plato wrote: