Dan Ingalls, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

A Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Dan Ingalls is interested in dynamic languages, graphics and kernel software. He is Principal Investigator of the Lively Kernel project, a project to rethink web programming and the web itself. Dan Ingalls is the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. More recently, he conceived a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator, now known as the Squeak open-source Smalltalk. Dan also invented pop-up menus, as well as BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today. As part of his work on Squeak, he designed generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. Dan received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He has also received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, and the ACM Software Systems Award.

Presentation: "The Lively Kernel"

Track: Real men don't do JavaScript

Time: Wednesday 13:20 - 14:10

Location: Rytmisk Sal

Abstract: The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a new approach to web programming. It provides a complete platform for web applications, including dynamic graphics, network access, and development tools, and requires nothing more than available web browsers. We call the system lively for three reasons: It comes live off a web page. There is no installation. The entire system is written in JavaScript, and it becomes active as soon as the page is loaded by a browser. It can change itself and create new content. The Lively Kernel includes a basic graphics editor that allows it to alter and create new graphical content, and also a simple IDE that allows it to alter and create new applications. It comes with a basic library of graphical and computational components, and these, as well as the kernel, can be altered and extended on the fly. It can save new artifacts, even clone itself, onto new web pages. The kernel includes WebDav support for browsing and extending remote file systems, and thus has the ability to save its objects and "worlds" (applications) as new active web pages. The Lively Kernel uses only existing web standards. The implementation and user language is JavaScript, known by millions and supported in every browser. The graphics APIs are built upon SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), also available in major browsers. The network protocols used are asynchronous HTTP and WebDav. The Lively Kernel is being made available as Open Source software under a GPL license. While it is not ready for use as a product, we expect significant participation from adventurous developers and academia.