[OLPC-Chicago] Hi There...

[Ian Bicking]

Atul Varma wrote:
> I haven't done anything with Sugar yet, but I was talking with Ian and 
> we were thinking that web apps, hosted by the local machine, might 
> actually be the best way to develop software for the OLPC folks.  That 
> way we don't have to deal with Sugar and can leverage all the expertise 
> many of us already have on web development, as well as using all the 
> great layout, typesetting, and graphical prowess that Mozilla already 
> has at its disposal.
> 
> Is anyone else interested in this kind of thing?  I think that Ian 
> mentioned we could also do some work on getting Mozilla to work more 
> nicely with Sugar, but that would be something that only a few people 
> who are familiar with XPCOM and other Mozilla internals would deal 
> with.  I think.

Incidentally, it uses xulrunner with the wrapper written in Python. 
Adding a button was really easy -- the whole wrapper is pretty simple. 
But all the fun stuff is inside the embedded browser stuff 
(self._embed), and I haven't figured out what's available there.  I have 
to poke around in some more docs; dir(self._embed) wasn't very useful. 
If you could get access to the DOM or something, that'd be awesome.  I 
suspect stuff like this is possible.  If you *don't* use this kind of 
thing, then you could probably use the single-process web browser and 
your activity will be much lighter.

As far as web apps, you can start up a server on localhost, but there's 
no convention for actually launching a browser pointing at your server. 
  It would actually be nice just to patch Python's webbrowser module to 
make it work; but at the moment the whole idea of an Activity that uses 
the browser is fuzzy.  We'll be figuring that out, though, so you can do 
stuff now as a web app and rely on the startup being cleaner eventually. 
  There will be a web server bundled on the laptop itself as well, but 
you'll never *have* to use that, so you can bundle your own server in 
your activity (and update it or not in the future).

I'm hoping to get a better handle on browser-based activities this 
weekend, when I'll be in Boston talking about this stuff with some of 
the other developers there.  I hope to have a much better feel for it 
after that.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org
             | Write code, do good | http://topp.openplans.org/careers