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.