User-evolvable tools in the web

• Authors: Jens Lincke;Robert Hirschfeld
• Venue: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration
• Year: 2013

Self-supporting development environments like Smalltalk and Emacs can be used to directly evolve themselves, making their tools very malleable and adaptable. In Web-based software development environments users can collaborate in creating software without having to install the environment locally. Bringing these two together and making Web-based environments self-supportive is challenging, since users have to take care of to breaking the system, since there might be others using it also. Environments aimed at end-users usually provide a scripting level above the base system. Instead of providing users with a fixed set of tools, we propose to make the tools user-evolvable by building them as scriptable objects in a shared user editable repository. In our system, the Lively Kernel, the core system is developed using modules and classes, and on top of it users create active content by directly manipulating and scripting objects. By leveraging the scripting level for the development of tools themselves, we allow users to adapt their tools in a self-supporting way, without the need to invasively change the system's core. In this paper we show how development tools in Lively are collaboratively evolved. Tools can be directly explored, adapted, and published in a shared manner while they are being used.