Comment by robertkrahn01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robertkrahn01 | Hacker News Reader

Author here. lively.next is a runtime and development environment. It comes with a graphical user interface and programming tools that allow you to program similarly to Smalltalk and Self, i.e. instead of a edit-compile-run cycle you have an ever running "program" and change various parts of it directly. With that you have access to runtime objects that you can inspect, use for code completion, or modify.

Apart from the UI (inspired by Self's Morphic [1]), lively.next implements a meta system on top of normal JavaScript that makes such things possible as to hold on and inspect system state (variables defined inside a module, mechanisms for redefining things etc).

Also, lively.next runs on any JS system and it's various packages can be embedded, e.g. to create a programming environment for node.js and other such things.

The Lively project evolved over time and lively.next is the newest version:

- https://www.lively-kernel.org is from the Sun Labs / HPI days (check out the ancient http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org, fully SVG based rendering)

- Lively Web: https://lively-web.org A live, programmable wiki (2012-2015)

- lively.next since 2016 https://lively-next.org.

[1] http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf

This sounds interesting for personal use, but I'm curious about how you share programs with people who aren't running the whole lively environment? What does that look like?

There are two parts to this:

a) How to user graphical constructions (we call them parts) outside of the main framework? We currently work on ways to "snapshot" them in a way that they include all their dependencies. So not just the object (graph) state but really all code dependencies. es6 modules are a big help here since they allow to trace dependencies statically. This is work in progress and we will post updates about this.

The state right now is that you can the HTML view of morphs into web pages, e.g. see [2]

b) Several parts of the system can be used standalone, e.g. you can enable support for Lively tooling in node.js processes or arbitrary webpages. See https://lively-next.org/worlds/lively-2-webpage for a bookmarklet that loads the lively.vm [1] and lively-system-interface on a arbitrary web page: https://imgur.com/a/2foGR. This allows you to then use the workspaces, system browser, inspectors, etc. on remote targets.

[1] https://livelykernel.github.io/lively.vm/

[2] https://lively-next.org/worlds/lively.next%20website

Thanks for the links. I've been looking for something where I can save executable snippets (shelling out to things or making RPCs to services) in a smalltalk-like browser, and it looks like this might work. I tried Amber a few months back, but couldn't figure out how to get node to shell out, so I went back to TCL+tk.

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