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Sun's Lively Kernel Comes to Life


JavaScript kernel shows off what the future could look like for Web browsers

By Alex Handy
October 5, 2007 — 
A research project unveiled by Sun Microsystems yesterday has brought back memories of Xerox PARC for one industry veteran. Known as the Lively Kernel, the JavaScript-based operating environment that allows for user interactions resembles those outlined by Alan Kay and others in the 1970s. With heavy Smalltalk influences and a hearty helping of the GPL, this open source project is now available for experimentation.

Kay, one of the originators of object-oriented programming and of the graphical user interface, was on hand at the demonstration to support friend and colleague Dan Ingalls, the lead on Sun’s Lively Kernel project. Kay commented that the demonstration resembled some of the things he'd created and demoed at the fabled Xerox PARC research facility some 30 years ago. The key difference here, however, is that all of the demonstrations took place inside a Web browser. Ingalls demonstrated the capabilities of the Lively Kernel to a crowd that included other members of the Smalltalk community.

The project began as an attempt to build a virtual machine inside JavaScript, but evolved into an entirely new platform for building Web applications. “What we've done is to take the things that are given to you in a browser and bring them alive in the way I've always wanted systems to be alive,” said Ingalls. The Lively Kernel is so flexible that editing its underpinnings can be done while it runs. The kernel can also spawn new copies of itself, and is recursive in the sense that a panel used to modify window styles can be modified by another instance of itself.

During the demonstration, Ingalls showed off the underlying scalable vector graphics engine of the Lively Kernel. Objects and windows created inside the kernel can be rotated, animated, enlarged and shrunk on the fly. One demonstration showed an animated clock face—Ingalls modified the clock code within the Lively Kernel, and the second hand began to tick backward as soon as the change was saved. Ingalls then attached a rotating polygon to the second hand, and the two objects became a single object encompassing the inherited properties of both. All of this can be done, explained Ingalls, due to the nature of dynamic languages such as JavaScript.

The Lively Kernel is now an open source project licensed under the GPLv2; Ingalls expressed his hopes that, despite the preliminary nature of his work, the world at large would pick up this JavaScript football and run with it. At around 300KB, the Lively Kernel is designed for embedding in Web pages as a building platform. Widgets and applications built in the Lively Kernel can be exported to run in other Lively Kernel implementations, or can be clustered together on separate Web pages, in much the same way that some operating systems offer multiple dynamically switchable desktop spaces.

The Lively Kernel is available to play with at research.sun.com/projects/lively/index.xhtml and at this time works well only in the preview releases of the Firefox 3 and the Safari 3 Web browsers. Ingalls said that he is anxious to see how the open source community uses and modifies the Lively Kernel; he and his team have many ideas for how it may be used, but they're not entirely certain which ones will drive adoption.


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