lively.next is a personal programming kit.
It emphasizes liveness, directness and interactivity.
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Design, develop, share
A direct manipulation object system with deep programming capabilites. lively.next allows one to rapidly prototype and share ideas. Development is live, immediate, and fun. Debug Mode is the Only Mode.
A personal programming kit
Workspaces and objects can be freely modified, stored, and shared. This allows for the creation of customized environments that are tailored to specific tasks. Ad-hoc scripting is easy which enables the automation of repetitious tasks or the creation of domain-specific tools.
Connect, mashup, lift
Be it web services, JavaScript libraries, operating systems, or databases; mashups and system integrations can be built by combining processes and data from external systems with Lively's rich programming facilities. This "lifts" less dynamic systems into the realm of live programming.
Its origin
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. Similar to other Smalltalk systems, Lively is modeled and implemented in itself, no artificial borders restrict exploration and change.
Full stack and modular
lively.next's architecture includes client and server and the various parts needed to form an interactive development environment such as a runtime meta system, object graph persistence, storage and resource abstractions, etc. These components are modular and reusable, see our open-source repositories for more details..
Research
The Lively team is interested to explore new programming abstractions and paradigms. Though the current system is mainly based around text-based programming, we are actively working on more powerful abstractions and tools that bridge the gap between visual and textual programming. An incomplete list of past prototypes can be found here.
A platform to express powerful ideas, much in the tradition of original systems and tools that defined the meaning of "personal computing" – this is what the Lively project is about. The lively.next system presented here 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.
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