lively.next
the truly integrated development environment
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lively.next is a personal programming kit.
It emphasizes liveness, directness and interactivity.

It combines rich live programming capabilities, in the spirit of Smalltalk, with a graphical direct manipulation workflow from current design tools. It seamlessly brigdes these two, allowing for rapid prototyping and efficient collaboration.

We aim to bring you an innovative programming experience while building an integrated system that brings designer and programmers together.
Try it out!
lively.next is and always will be free and MIT licensed.
👪 Building Together
No need to "quickly grab the new color codes from the mockup" - lively.next allows designers and programmers to seamlessly work together on the same artifacts. Spend more time doing your best work, instead of redoing someone elses.
🔁 Powerful Component System
lively.next's component system allows you to build fast!. Import components build by others via the public partsbin component library or make and reuse your own building blocks.
🖨️ Code Generation That Just Works
Components can be edited visually or by writing code. Both options are equally powerful and code is generated and kept in sync for all changes made visually.
🔋️ Batteries Included
lively.next comes with a basic set of often-used GUI components, a version control system build on top of git that hides all the complicated internals while allowing experts to stick to their accustomed workflows, and a custom bundler, that allows you to easily host your work as static webpages.
🎨️ Make it Yours
lively.next is a (mostly) self-contained development environment. We develop lively.next inside of lively.next. What does that mean for your? Everything is inspectable, hackable, and customizable - allowing you to quickly build extremely powerful tools, perfectly fitting your workflow and needs.
🤸 Full Stack Live Programming
lively.next is...well, alive! We take live programming seriously - evaluate statements anywhere, observe their effect and act accordingly! We provide you with tooling to quickly inspect the state of objects and patch behavior - all time is runtime. While running in the browser, all of this also works for backend scripting in Node.js - of course also from within lively.next.
 
Our Vision

The lively team aims to build a platform to express 🔗 powerful ideas much in the tradition of original systems and tools that defined the meaning of "personal computing". We are inspired, among others, by

- the works and powerful ideas of 🔗 Alan Kay,
- Doug Engelbarts 🔗 mother of all demos,
- the flexibility of 🔗 Smalltalk,
- and original authoring-for-all-tools like Bill Atkinson's 🔗 HyperCard.

lively.next forms a flexible personal computing environment and construction kit. Yet we hope, that it will just be a stepping stone towards a medium that truly helps us think, learn, do, and create - in the spirit of what Bret Victor calls 🔗 Seeing Spaces.

Lively might look different from conventional programming systems but it is based on some of the same ideas and mechanisms than Smalltalk systems introduced over 40 years ago. Its user interface is a variant of Self's 🔗 Morphic. The goal of the Lively project is to evolve those powerful concepts and combine them with novel ideas to make programming less rigid and narrow.
the truly integrated development environment
We are looking for funding! 💌 funding@lively-next.org