Comments on: Sun Labs Lively Kernel: Morphic UI for the Web (Self and Squeak)

By: Carl Gundel

Carl Gundel — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:36:43 +0000

I think that the implementation is impractical, but what’s really important is that the concepts are demonstrated in a popular and current language. People wrongly think that Smalltalk is obsolete, but if it’s in Javascript (eh?) it gets some attention. It also doesn’t hurt that it can run in a web browser which helps make it viral. Perhaps this sort of thing will inspire dynamic translators for Javascript interpreters? ;-)

By: John Hensley

John Hensley — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:57:33 +0000

Of course it’s slow, but that’s not the point. The point is that Javascript + SVG is robust enough to pull this off. It’s also significant that something based on Squeak was successfully ported. The Smalltalk language is well past its use-by date, and the only future for its technology lies in porting it elsewhere.

I was mildly disappointed that the demo didn’t include a web browser :)

By: Shawn K.

Shawn K. — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:35:45 +0000

This almost drove me insane.
Like brad said, it’s neat…but IMO, it’s pointless.
The whole framework is slow, buggy, and not near as responsive as it could have been.

By: Shayne

Shayne — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:53:27 +0000

Hah. It is a bit like squeek isn’t it. Validates what I’ve been saying all these years. That Netscape really should of used smalltalk as its scripting language, and if it did we’d be MILES ahead of where we are today.

Not sure why it validates it. But I’m sure it dows.. somehow (The reason I think smalltalk would be perfect for the web is the whole message passing idiom, and the ‘from little things big things grow’ idea. smalltalk does both perfectly. It really is the pinnacle of OO coding )

By: mefisto

mefisto — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:31:01 +0000

Tried on opera at first .. page wasnt loading. Then i tried on 9.5alpha becase it has best svg support (afaik). Same.

Then i tried on safari .. it was laggy and half of widgets had issues (a.k.a major bugs). It cant be beta.

By: Brad Neuberg

Brad Neuberg — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:24:59 +0000

This is a cool experiment. Dan Ingalls is a real innovator who has done some amazing things. While SVG might not be up to the job of powering something like this cross-browser, it points the way to some future possibilities of how we might build web-based systems.

Brad

By: K9

K9 — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:54:42 +0000

When is Sun going to hire some graphic designers? This is an interesting demo, but the visuals are not professional looking at all. The JavaFX demos are just as bad:
https://openjfx.dev.java.net/images/javafxpad-demo.png
https://openjfx.dev.java.net/images/casual-demo.png

Seems like a waste to spend so much time on technology and not have someone come up with a decent color palette at minimum.

By: Amnon

Amnon — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:15:16 +0000

for another framework that enables JavaScript applications check out JNEXT (http://jnext.org) JavaScript can be used for creating full fledged applications. I've successfully used it before exactly for that purpose in large projects. It is a very powerful language which deceptively resembles C. Extending it to enable access to native OS resources bridges the last step in making it a super tool to rapidly create applications.

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:32:55 +0000

Ahhh.. My CPU, it burns, it burns. … Cntl+W.. Ok, all better now.

By: Joeri

Joeri — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:16:43 +0000

I think it’s good that they’re pushing the envelope. SVG could eventually grow to fill flash’s shoes vector-graphics wise, and then environments like these would allow people to build flash-like applications without actually having to require flash.

Right now it’s just an interesting proof of concept, not something you would use in production code, but it shows the potential of javascript+svg for regular web apps, instead of for just animating pretty pictures.

By: Tyler Rorabaugh

Tyler Rorabaugh — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 02:03:24 +0000

Actually whats really interesting about it is that Dan Ingalls actually works on squeak which is the underlying platform for http://www.opencroquet.org -

By: Julien Lecomte

Julien Lecomte — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:42:45 +0000

Well, it’s very unstable. But at least, it’s slow :-)

By: Joonas Lehtinen

Joonas Lehtinen — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:06:07 +0000

Lively is a really interesting example on what can be done by using SVG as a sole rendering engine. Unfortunately the current implementations of SVG run so slow that it is quite unpractical when used this way. The user experience might change dramatically if (for example) Apple implemented SVG directly using their powerful core libraries with hardware assisted rendering.

By: Simon Jia

Simon Jia — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:20:18 +0000

runs really slow and hogs a crap load of memory. still in beta i guess.

By: Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:37:36 +0000

I like the morphic stuff. I hope this goes somewhere.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:37:17 +0000

safari only? sounds like future abandonware.

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:19:05 +0000

I agree with James. It’s a very interesting toy/proof-of-concept.

By: James Murray

James Murray — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:10:30 +0000

it seems kind of pointless too me, i played with all the tutorials and then took at look at lively itself. It’s so slow it’s unusable, not to mention, I can just feel how much memory it’s chewing up.

And the entire interface is sluggish and awkward. I don’t see a need for something like this to be produced. Now, as a case study, it’s very nice. however i couldn’t see this actually being useful for anything more than wasting time

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:53:07 +0000

I love Asteroids! I wonder if this is SUN’s answer to the Silverlight/Flash battle — The ActiveX wars.

By: Jonathan Leech

Jonathan Leech — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:43:48 +0000

A lot like dsvg, svgui, etc. Very well done. I wonder if it could run in Batik?