[lively-kernel] Self-style object outliners

[Dan Ingalls]

Hi Adam -

This is really cool (and thanks, Jens for sending out a picture).

We are planning several things that may also help you going forward:  general serialization to JSON, and some playing around with OMeta for Smalltalk-on-LK experiments.  Jens and Robert are working on a road map for a bunch of projects at HPI this spring.

It's great to have you playing around with LK and Self-like experiments.  I have wanted to revisit our Morphic from the standpoint of flexibility for deconstruction/reconstruction - something that Self under Randy and Dave did really well; we lost a bit ot that in Squeak and a bit more in Lively.

Cool stuff!

	- Dan
------------------------------------
>Lately I've been feeling homesick for Self, so I used Lively Kernel to
>create a sorta-kinda vaguely Self-like environment for Javascript.
>
>There are lots of rough edges and bugs and missing features, but you
>can try it out at:
>
>    http://adamspitz.com/Lively-Outliners/example.xhtml
>
>    (and the code is at http://github.com/AdamSpitz/Lively-Outliners)
>
>It isn't much. The main thing is object outliners
>(http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/object-focus.html) -
>similar to inspectors, in that they let you look at an individual
>object, but with enough programming features (you can edit methods,
>organize slots into categories, attach comments to objects or slots,
>drag an arrow to set the contents of a slot, etc.) that they're used
>for writing code as well. In Self we use these as a replacement for
>both inspectors and code browsers. The idea is to give you the feeling
>of getting your hands directly on your objects, rather than feeling
>like you're using a tool that shows you a view of an object that's
>hidden behind the scenes somewhere.
>
>There's also a transporter system
>(http://research.sun.com/self/papers/transporter.html) for organizing
>objects into modules and filing them out as .js files. (The demo isn't
>quite fully-functional; I had trouble getting WebDAV working on my
>server. But I rigged up a little CGI script so that when you file out
>a module you can download the .js file through your web browser.)
>
>Anyway, I don't really trust this thing with my code yet. (I'm using
>it to manage most of its own code, but I double-check the filed-out
>.js files to make sure they look OK.) But I wanted to show it to the
>LK community, to get a sense of whether anybody here is interested in
>this kind of thing. (I could use some advice on how to make it play
>more nicely with the rest of LK.)
>
>This thing was fun to put together - LK is a nice platform to build on. :)
>
>
>Adam
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