Time for another run at the fence?
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Time for another run at the fence?
 
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Good People of Lively -
Several forces are converging, and it makes me want to see who's really out there these days, and who might be interested in pushing Lively up onto the next plateau. Water over the dam It's been five months since I've been really active with Lively. I might have been a bit more active except that time included a job change (from Sun to SAP). It is not yet clear how much of my energy I can devote to Lively in my new job, but it's a huge improvement in energy flow to be away from the JavaFX juggernaut. Finally, as I had hoped, we now have Lively moved to neutral territory at HPI where the climate is truly enthusiastic. Let's have a party If you all lived in the neighborhood, I'd have us over for beer and pizza so we could get to know each other, find out what each is most interested in, and plot some next steps that could be fun for all of us. Presumably we're all on the mailing list because there is something about Lively that got us excited, and chances are that if we work together a bit (or even just discuss it for a while), we'll come up with a merry prank or two. So let's go around the room once and, even if you think you've already done this, send in a message that briefly tells... What excites you about the Lively Kernel? How much time do you currently put into LK? How much time do you think you could put into LK if you got fired up? What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like to do for LK ? What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like someone else to do for LK? Any other random comments you'd like to make, or links to share? My two cents Just to break the ice, I'll start off with my intro. At first I thought I shouldn't do this in case it would influence others, but then I thought I would go ahead anyway for pretty much the same reason. Go figure ;-). What excites you about the Lively Kernel? I grew up doing physics experiments in my basement. To me computers are exquisite laboratories, but there is no mainstream software that lets you play around and do experiments. Things are actually worse than 30 years ago when every computer came with Basic. An entire generation is growing up thinking all you can do is run Windows and maybe program Java in Eclipse if you want to spend a year or two learning. To me the Lively Kernel is a chance to build something like Squeak -- a *simple* live graphical composition environment with everything programmable -- and make it as accessible in every browser, and able to share our creations with everyone as web pages. How much time do you currently put into LK? About 1 hour a day (more today ;-) How much time do you think you could put into LK if you got fired up? 2 hours a day, more if I can make it relevant at SAP (working on that ;-) What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like to do for LK ? Make it the best and coolest tool to put together a slide show Then every time we give talks we will be advertising LK Also subsumes the goal of simple web site creation Make an Open App Store LK runs on iPhone, iPad, and may other cell phones So we could do our own App Store right now Add more constraints -- connectors, physics modelling, etc What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like someone else to do for LK? Get LK working with Google Docs and other popular systems Remove LK's dependence on XML in favor of JSON Separate the Canvas and SVG layers and make Canvas fast Add a nice database interface. Get collaboration (multiple Morphic hands) working Any other random comments you'd like to make? I was going to add "Rewrite the whole system", but I don't think we need to do that just yet. LK is good enough to do good things, and I think we need to create some fun for ourselves and some buzz on the outside. I've got toms of other ideas, when the time comes ;-) Other good news Jens and Robert have been quiet, but they have not been idle. In addition to their normal load of school work they have managed to recreate the Lively Kernel home at HPI, along with mail list, repository and other bits of forward-looking organization... http://www.lively-kernel.org/ They've also been doing some cool new work in LK, for example... http://www.lively-kernel.org/repository/webwerkstatt/draft/ConnectExamples.xhtml And finally, Jens is about to offer a seminar at HPI in which student teams will choose and work on various Lively Kernel projects... http://lively-kernel.org/repository/webwerkstatt/ProjectSeminar2010/ProjectSeminarSlides.xhtml Hopefully we will hear more about this activity as soon as it starts up. I'm hoping the idea of Lively projects spreads to other universities. Ours is a system in which students can see how everything works, change it themselves, and experience real personal computing. It's a good counter to the much heavier Java/Eclipse curriculum offerings. Y'all write back and tell us what you're up to - Dan |
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What excites you about the Lively Kernel? - Simplicity and portability. The ability to deploy to the iPhone/iPad is a big draw.
- The concept of small applications being passed around with some users enhancing and improving them is also appealing. I started programming in the Apple II / Atari 800 era. Reducing the distinction between user and developer excites me.
How much time do you currently put into LK? Essentially zero. How much time do you think you could put into LK if you got fired up? I have no idea. I have a new job and child. What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like to do for LK ? - Ask stupid questions. - Provide a quick way to get started. I'm thinking about a development environment based on Maven and Grizzly, so that setup of a development environment would be really simple for anyone who has a working NetBeans installation.
- Investigate HTML 5 support. Net distribution and the ability to run detached are opposite, but vital goals. - Investigate a pure-Java client. What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like someone else to do for LK? - More getting started documentation. The documentation that shows what it is capable of is great.
- There should be more documentation about how to create such a page from scratch. - A hitchhikers guide to the code would also be really useful. |
Re: Time for another run at the fence?
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In reply to this post by Dan Ingalls-4
This response is rough because I'm busy moving until later in the week. I hope I'll be able to resubmit a more considered response later this week...
- the malleability of the environment: sculpting instead of "writing code" - the potential for a cleanly implemented web stack, and the flexibility to be able to use alternatives to HTML and CSS.
I put in more than 1000 coding hours last spring creating demos, reporting bugs, fixing bugs, experimenting with polish in Lively. Had a great time! The coding I currently do with Lively is lottery analysis for the purpose of funding to help accelerate adoption with promotion, fund contests, hire additional designers (including myself).
Finding a small grant or winning the lottery would fire me up. Then I would work with Lively 8+ hours most every day. (I am not really trying to be amusing here.) :-)
- create a demo project which mimics a typical slick vertically scrolling webpage and illustrate how it's more malleable than using HTML and CSS. (rollover link effects, rollover menu effects, etc. )
- create documentation for Lively ENTIRELY as code examples and snippets and integrate with the ide - enhance and polish the ide. Jens and Robert are doing amazing work but much more usability and polish are needed for me to want to switch to using the ide.
- there's more stuff: these may not be my top three: I'll need to revisit.
(Dan I need to come back to these : I do like the one's you have listed...)
Get collaboration (multiple Morphic hands) working
Add a nice database interface (JSON/Java based: dovetaildb, persevere, etc.) Separate the Canvas and SVG layers and make Canvas fast Remove LK's dependence on XML in favor of JSON
Create a wikipedia entry for Lively
About me: Two significant influences on my software career and creative skills: 1. performing magic as a child 2. English studies in college instilled how to compose clean, disciplined, pretty code. I am an author.
Random comment: LK could use a benefactor. More later, Philip Weaver On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Dan Ingalls <[hidden email]> wrote: Good People of Lively - |
Re: Time for another run at the fence?
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What excites you about the Lively Kernel?
Smalltalk spoiled me. Then Self spoiled me even worse. I've got all these ideas in my head for things that I wanna build, but every time I try to build them using mainstream technologies I end up tearing my hair out. LK seems like a chance to build a computing system that I can stomach on top of a platform that's actually got mainstream support and is already installed everywhere. How much time do you currently put into LK? For the past couple of months, about six hours a day, on average. I've been working (see http://adamspitz.com/Lively-Outliners/ ) on bringing some of Self's ideas to LK. How much time do you think you could put into LK if you got fired up? I'm already fired up! But I can't keep spending this much time on LK unless I can find a way to get paid for it. I'm considering a few possibilities. What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like to do for LK ? - Make it possible to use LK in a prototype-based way, without those pesky "class" things cluttering everything up. - Experiment with direct-manipulation UI ideas. ("Poses" instead of tools, etc.) - After that, my plans get a lot fuzzier. :) There are lots of things I can imagine doing, or wanting other people to do: - A tile-scripting thing like Etoys. - An alternate syntax that hides some of Javascript's warts. (I hate typing the word "function" all the time. I hate that "obj.x" rips the attribute out of the object instead of doing a nice message send. Etc.) - More of Self's cartoon-style animation techniques, and apply them pervasively throughout LK. - Make it really easy to deploy an LK application on something like Google App Engine. Or games using http://www.reddwarfserver.org/ (formerly Sun Labs' Project Darkstar). - Set up a Git repository for the official version of LK, so that it's easier for me to maintain my own fork of LK, and to stay in sync with the latest official version, and to get my changes incorporated into the official version (if you're interested). - A debugger. (Though I don't think this is possible without hacking the Javascript VM itself, so I'm not optimistic about this one.) - A way to snapshot the whole image. (Ditto.) |
Re: Time for another run at the fence?
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In reply to this post by Philip Weaver
And here come my answers to the little questionnaire :-)
What excites you about the Lively Kernel? I started working with Lively 2008 as an intern at Sun together with Robert Krahn programming Lively Fabrik, a visual (end-user) programming environment in Lively. Back at the HPI I used Lively to develop ContextJS (A Context-oriented programming extension to JavaScript). It was then when I left the started actually developing inside the Browser. To not contaminate the LivelyWiki and break it by accident, I do my research in WebWerkstatt. Currently we are preparing a project seminar at the HPI, where our students will work with and extent the Lively Kernel. How much time do you currently put into LK? All my programming time goes currently into Lively and related projects, but the actual time varies from week to week. How much time do you think you could put into LK if you got fired up? I think I am already fired up :-) What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like to do for LK ? - make it usable for our students - close the circle of the self porting development process - make it end-user compatible What are the top 3 or 4 things you would like someone else to do for LK? - help cleaning up the Wiki - help in writing documentation or hacker's guide to lively Any other random comments you'd like to make, or links to share? To demonstrate that quietness on the mailing list does not correlate with a our development, we will put all the little things that may be interesting to the community in a Lively ChangeLog. http://www.lively-kernel.org/repository/lively-wiki/changelog/changelog.xhtml http://www.lively-kernel.org/repository/webwerkstatt/. |
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