[General] Coming soon to a browser near you...

[Dan Ingalls]

Folks -

I've now spent several hours working on LK without the use of any 
other software (pretty much).  We hope to put out a release by the 
end of this week that will allow you to do the same.

Here's how it works:

On a server somewhere you place personal copies of the LK source 
files.  I actually use Apache on my Mac with the files on my Mac so I 
can work away from the Internet.  Doing it this way, I'm only using 
what anyone could use on a computer with a browser and no disk and no 
other software.

You start up Safari and load up the Lively Kernel (I typically do 
development with Config.skipMostExamples = true to make things load 
quicker).  Then you go into the development world and in the 
directory browser you select the source code files you care about and 
use the menu command to open a changeList on each.  This provides a 
window for browsing all the class and method definitions in the file 
without running up against the limits of LK's current text editor.

Then you make the changes you want and and open a second tab or 
window of Safari to try out the new version.  If it crashes, you can 
just go back to the first tab that is still running a stable version 
and fix what you need to, until things are right.

This cycle can be repeated many times, interrupted only by times that 
you manage to take out Safari (rare) or the whole OS (I haven't done 
this yet).  When that happens, you will have to get back to some 
stable source code and restart the process.  This can require another 
text editor :-(.

When you've done what you set out to do, then you use CVS (or your 
favorite groupware) to commit your changes to the team shared code 
database, and go on to start on the next project.  It's actually the 
rudiments of team development, all in LK.  Woo-hoo!

By the way, text is much faster, the browser can now view the actual 
source code (ie with comments, and not decompiled), and I'm working 
on searches for all senders and implementers of selected messages.

Stay tuned

	- Dan (for the team)


PS:  In case this all seems overly nerdy, the gestalt I am working 
toward is that each time you make a change, it becomes a new web page 
that you or anyone else can share and experiment with .  In that way 
the unit of distribution is the same, whether you're building an 
application, fixing a bug in the text editor, or making a Christmas 
card.  It's just that there are a few more things to finish between 
here and there...