lively.next

lively.next is a personal programming kit. It emphasizes liveness, directness, and interactivity.

It combines rich live programming capabilities, in the spirit of Smalltalk, with a graphical direct manipulation workflow from current design tools. It seamlessly bridges these two, allowing for rapid prototyping and efficient collaboration.

We aim to bring you an innovative programming experience while building an integrated system that brings designer and programmers together.

[!WARNING]

lively.next is beta software and under continuous development.

You are very welcome to play with it! But please be aware, that there are no guarantees regarding the stability of APIs yet.

Setup

You need to install lively.next on your system.

Installation Requirements

[!TIP]

If you want to change files outside of lively (i.e., in a normal editor), while still having the changes be available in lively when opening the file, you'll need to install entr from its repository. Usually, when working inside of lively.next, this will not be an issue, but it can be handy when working heavily on the core of lively. This feature works semi-reliable at the moment. If you are interested in this and would like to help debug this, please reach out!

Currently, MacOS, Linux, and the Linux Subsystem for Windows are supported. Make sure you have the following software installed:

1. node.js v20.10
2. git.

We try to require/support the current LTS version of node.

For some more advanced development operations (such as bulk testing from the command line and spell checking inside of lively.next), you will also need

• sed or gsed on MacOs
• ss or netstat on MacOs
• perl
• python3 with sultan installed
• brotli
• aspell.

[!TIP]

If you want to change files outside of lively (i.e., in a normal editor), while still having the changes be available in lively when opening the file, you'll need to install entr from its repository. Usually, when working inside of lively.next, this will not be an issue, but it can be handy when working heavily on the core of lively. This feature works semi-reliable at the moment. If you are interested in this and would like to help debug this, please reach out!

Installation Instructions

1. Clone this repository and run the install.sh script. This will install the necessary dependencies and build some bundles that are necessary for the bootstrapping process of lively.next. Please note, that this process will take a few minutes.
2. Run the start.sh script.
3. Lively will now be running on computer and be accessible at http://localhost:9011.

[!TIP]

You can use start.sh with a --debug or -d flag to inspect the lively server with a node debugger. You can also use --port=<PORT> or -p <PORT> to specify on which port the lively server should run.

Usually, running start.sh will now be enough to get you going again.

Updating lively.next

When a new version of lively.next is available, the Version Indicator in the lower-left corner will look like this:

Pressing will start the update process, automatically restart the server and prompt you to reload your lively session. Please make sure to save all your progress before updating.

Manually updating can be done by pulling the latest version and just executing install.sh again. The server needs to be restarted afterwards and you need to reload your lively session.

[!CAUTION]

Please note, that these instructions currently are not recommended for openly deploying lively.next in the web!

[!IMPORTANT]

This does not mean that you cannot deploy applications built with lively.next. Of course, frozen applications can be served via any hoster!

However, making a development server publicly available is highly discouraged, as it comes with unfiltered access to the local file system and shell, among other things.

Documentation

Interactive Explanations and Guide

We provide all information necessary to start developing in lively.next on our website. We recommend this as an entry point for all users.

Wiki

Some more hints and documentation can be found in the project wiki. Note, that these are much less polished than the contents provided on the website.

Technical Documentation

Source-Code documentation (only relevant for developers and most useful for those who want to contribute to the lively.next core) can be found here.

License

This project is MIT licensed.