Collaborate on Reeborg's World using Mozilla's TogetherJS

If you go to http://reeborg.ca/world.html and click on "Start TogetherJS" at the top, you can get a URL to share with others.  This hopefully will be found useful by teachers who can help their students remotely.

Note that the exact location of the Start TogetherJS button may change in the near future.  Thanks to Ian Bicking and others at Mozilla for creating this amazing tool.

Feedback is welcome! ;-)

Reeborg's world: more options to share

RUR-PLE's primary goal was to create a very easy path for people that wanted to learn programming.  The original version still had a significant hurdle to jump over for absolute beginners.  They had to 1) download and install Python; 2) download and install wxPython; 3) download and unzip the files for RUR-PLE's distribution.  This is probably considered to be trivial by the reader of this blog ... but it was not so for the users (some of whom were young children ... or their parents!)  So, it really required to have someone nearby with some computer savyy and, since it required to install programs, some teachers could not use it without jumping through additional hoops to have it installed on the school computers.

As more users joined in, some volunteered to create "one-click" install files (.exe, .dmg, etc) for various systems.  These were made available on Google code; however, since new downloads can not be added (due, I understand, to how this service was abused by some other "projects"), this means that yet a new home (after the original sourceforge site) would have to be found for updates.  Furthermore, this does not solve the issue of installing software on school's computers.

These various facts were the main impetus behind my desire to create a web version as something with the absolute lowest barrier to entry.  To my mind, this means no creation of user accounts.   With no user accounts, there is nothing saved on the server.  Still, it is useful for people learning to program to be able to save their results.  So, I implemented:

• An automatic save of a program state when it's run successfully.  This includes the code in the "library".  It also saves the "world" that was selected, as well as the programming language (Python, Javascript of CoffeeScript). This way, when a user returns to the page, it restarts from where it was left off.   However, this uses localStorage which is appropriate only when everything is done from a single browser.
• For students that may want to work on the school computer and at home, I implemented a way to save to files (hello USB keys...); this can be either the world selected (which the student can edit) or the program or the content of the library, each saved separately.

I thought this was going to be enough until I got an email from the Samsung folks behind the Junior Software Academy initiative.  As I mentioned in a previous blog, they created a book based on rur-ple.  They now would like students to take part in a mini programming contest and wanted to be able to have the students show their results.  This works fine if rur-ple is installed on the computer they have ... but a web based solution was thought to be more interesting. So, I implemented a permalink utility which enables one to save the complete state (programming language, world definition, code in editor and library) and share this as a url.  Here is a silly example.  

One more thing I would like to do is to implement a collaborative mode using Mozilla's TogetherJS.  However, this will require quite a bit more coding, based on what I saw in an earlier attempt, just after TogetherJS was announced. 

Reeborg knows multiple programming languages

I wish I were in Montreal to visit my daughter, eat some delicious Saint-Sauveur bagels for breakfast, a good La Banquise poutine and some Montreal Smoked Meat for lunch... and, of course, attend Pycon.  Alas....

In the meantime, a quick update: Reeborg now knows Python, Javascript and CoffeeScript.  The old tutorials are gone as Reeborg's World has seen too many changes.  I now am in the process of writing the following tutorials, all using Reeborg's world as the test environment

1. A quick introduction to Python (for people that know programming in another language)
2. A quick introduction to Javascript (same as above)
3. A quick introduction to CoffeeScript (same as above)
4. An introduction to programming using Python, for absolute beginners
5. An introduction to programming using Javascript, for absolute beginners
6. An introduction to Object-Oriented Programming concepts using Python
7. An introduction to Object-Oriented Programming concepts using Javascript

Note that I have two "versions" of Javascript, one that uses JSHint to enforce good programming practices (and runs the code with "use strict"; option) and one that is the normal permissive Javascript.

If anyone knows of any other transpilers written in Javascript that can convert code client-side from language X into Javascript (like Brython does for Python, or CoffeeScript does naturally), I would be interested in adding them as additional options.