[OLPC-Chicago] Hi There...

[Ian Bicking]

Atul Varma wrote:
> On 5/1/07, *Chris McAvoy* <chris.mcavoy at gmail.com 
> <mailto:chris.mcavoy at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Yes!  Absolutely!
> 
>     What did you guys have in mind?  Building out a light-weight web-dev
>     thing?  I wouldn't be able to help with the Mozilla bits, but I think
>     I could lend a hand with coming up with some sort of best practice for
>     building local web apps.  Would they run from the XO?  Or are you
>     talking about building stuff that's optimized for the XO, but would
>     run on a server?
> 
> 
> I was thinking that they would run from the XO.
> 
> I think it would be neat to "port" (though I'm not sure exactly how much 
> "porting" would be required, if any) something like Crunchy/Crunchy Frog 
> ( http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/).  Ian says that there's sort of 
> political stuff going on in the higher echelons of OLPC that are 
> dictating what platform to use, or something--apparently everyone up 
> there is interested in Sugar and doesn't see the web as a viable 
> platform for OLPC, so if we were to create a sort of "killer app" that's 
> localhost web-based, it could turn some heads.

Well, I don't want to spread rumors, I'm kind of speculating.  I also 
get the impression that there's some movement happening in Sugar -- I 
think they are going away from roll-your-own widgets, and instead using 
GTK widgets.  So we might be moving towards a more cohesive situation 
where it's not quite as either/or.

Also, you can do a heck of a lot with CSS, so I don't think the look and 
feel has to be that different.  You can also freely use Mozilla CSS, 
like -moz-border-radius, because who the heck cares about IE?

> A web app that takes advantage of the mesh network would be especially 
> awesome--say, for instance, a MOO-like environment where all the 
> inhabitants were the local people in the mesh network or something...

There's something called OLPCities that is like that: 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCities

I'm not sure if Javascript will perform well enough, or if this is 
really a good strategy.  But perhaps.  It's also possible the browser 
could be more helpful -- e.g., something XMLHttpRequest, except it can 
push data into the browser instead of having to poll the server. 
Because the portability requirements aren't really there, we can 
consider things that are normally not possible with standard Ajax.


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