Hi all,
More for my benefit than anything else, I’ve set out below some thoughts on where OurSelf.io is headed.
The general idea is to make OurSelf.io an online place for individuals and small teams to work on/play with Self.
Why online? It gives us two important things:
(1) access anywhere, including new ARM Apples, phones, Windows etc
(2) it is collaboration and team focused out of the box.
Somewhat like a mashup of something like AWS Workspaces, where you get GUI access to a running Windows or Linux desktop, and Heroku where you publish developed code for general access. Except of course that you have to use Self. :)
For a small team, OurSelf.io should support the full lifecycle of Self development and use, including building a snapshot, publishing .self files to GitHub, and potentially allowing the publication of Self worlds as websites or interactive GUIs (depending on server capacity).
At the moment, I have the core infrastructure set up. There is still an invite code needed to open an account and run Self for more than the 20 minutes of the demo (Invite is: “ourselves"), hopefully I’ll be able to remove that soon, I just need better monitoring so I can see when spammers start abusing the system.
I’m doing this as the mood strikes me and when I’m not supposed to be doing something else, so there are absolutely no timeframes or promises attached to any of it!
If any of this sounds like fun, speak up. It’d be great to have some collaboration!
Russell
Next steps
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Backend Infrastructure:
- You should be able to restart the Self VM (not the whole container) from the web interface as a quick way to get out of crashes
- The web interface should expose the snapshot versions so you can ‘rollback’ to a previous snapshot.
- More and better backend monitoring
Improvements to standard image:
* A subway system - a morph to put down markers which you can jump between. An easy way to split your desktop into areas, and also helpful for multi-user development.
* A terminal morph, so you can easily access the underlying Unix tools (git, cc etc) and also ssh into other systems.
* A central repository for Self packages and tools to load them with dependencies, a la homebrew, apt, pkgsrc etc from the various Linux/Unix distros. A possible precedent here is Lex Spoon’s Package Universes he did ages ago for Squeak.
Improvements to demo image:
* Recreate the demo morphs to give new users a guided tour of Self and its possibilities
Someday maybe
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* Port VM to FreeBSD
* Replace current Xorg->X11vnc->novnc pathway with pure Self code
* Create messageBroker plumbing to allow Self snapshots and Ourself.io system to talk to each other easily.
* Allow running Self instances to expose a webserver on a suitable domain.
* Allow customised ‘demo’ instances.
* Web interface to download and upload Self snapshots to system.
* Premade server images so you can easily run locally.
