The award-winning Avida-ED educational program has been distributed in the past in platform-specific versions for Apple Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. The difficulties involved in maintaining separate code bases has limited our ability to update these versions, with the Linux version being dropped in 2008 and the Windows version last having an update in
The ability to run Avida-ED as a web application became a possibility with the introduction of the Emscripten compiler technology. Emscripten can compile the Avida C++ code to a Javascript callable library. This is bleeding-edge technology and is not yet reduced to a build process that can be simply described or replicated, but we hope that will become the case in the future. The Avida version used in Avida-ED Web is the latest version of this artificial life research tool.
The user interface for Avida-ED Web is implemented in HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. The basic layout was done in the Maqetta UI design tool, which set a primary reliance on the Dojo Javascript framework. The design goal was to replicate the latest Mac OS X Avida-ED interface.
The project needs to be hosted on a web server. The user will request the AvidaED.html file to load the application.
The "avida.js" and "avida.js.mem" files were pulled from the Avida github repository and added to the root of the distribution on the web server.
In addition to the instructions above, some more work is needed for locally hosting AvidaEd Web.
If hosting this on the local machine, Python can be used to set up a web server.
:: cd /path/to/av_ui
:: python -m SimpleHTTPServer
One can then access the AvidaEd application with
:: http://127.0.0.1/AvidaED.html
Other web servers should work as well for local hosting (XAMPP and similar projects), but we have not tested those.
The user interface, being implemented in HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript, requires no compilation.
The Avida-core library, however, needs to be built and compiled to a pair of Javascript libraries, "avida.js" and "avida.js.mem". The instructions for this are not yet available.
The difference in technology between a web application and a desktop application does result in visual and behavioral differences between the two.
In the desktop application, once a workspace was established, further work automatically was saved to it.
In web applications, the security model prevents any direct access of an application to the native filesystem. Therefore, any work done in the web application will be lost unless explicitly downloaded by the user to their local filesystem. Thus, the user is responsible for exporting the workspace after any work they wish to save.
The exported workspace from the Avida-ED Web application is designed to be backwards-compatible with the workspaces used by the Mac OS X Avida-ED version 2 application.
Configured dishes and Populated dishes can be dragged from the freezer to the configuration text box above the population grid; they cannot be dropped on the grid itself.
Populated dishes must be dragged to one of the text boxes at the bottom; they cannot be dropped on the chart area.