The Lively project explores the potential of a live object system to be an ideal personal computing environment. Lively users can compose and script objects live in any Internet browser, and save and share the resulting compositions and simulations as active web pages.

The Lively project is born out of the Smalltalk tradition of live, object-oriented personal computing environments. Our open-source creations (Lively Kernel and Lively Web) extend this approach to the world of cloud computing. Lively creations can be saved and shared as web pages, and can embed and communicate with other resources on the Internet. Click here  for an impression of what the project is about.

We collaborate with a number of other groups, most notably members of the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute  in Potsdam, with whom we have enjoyed a constant exchange of discussions, software projects and interns. Two of HARC’s full-time employees began as Lively interns from HPI.

The entire Lively project is open-source under an MIT license, and accessible at github.com/LivelyKernel/ .

A list of past projects and prototypes can be found at lively-web.org/projects .

Ongoing projects within Lively include…

  • lively.next  A set of packages that, taken together, form a powerful IDE and construction kit. Used standalone lively.next’s packages can be combined with other systems to connect and “lift” them into the Lively universe, making Lively the control and mashup center.

  • Pronto Pronto is a reimagining of the Lively user experience to make it more accessible to new users and other non-experts. It will be easier to pick up and use on pads and other touch devices, it will provide more guidance and less confusing choices for simple object constructions and finally it will offer more powerful and concrete construction capabilities such as replications, simple physics and other constraints.

  • Lively-4 Lively-4 is the work of our collaborators at the Hasso Plattner Institute , in Potsdam Germany. It features an architecture that is more closely wed to the DOM structure used to present web pages in browsers. This offers the possibility to interact more intimately with non-Lively web pages.