Hi Eliot,

This is very interesting news, especially because I have been involved
in developing a collaborative environment along lines somewhat related
to QWAG with my students. It's called FVE and is text-based. A MOO-style
environment, unfortunately not in Smalltalk. It is at the stage of a
working and tested prototype and its most interesting features are the
following:

- Written to be runtime programmable by users. MOOs are usually
programmed in LambdaMOO, FVE can be programmed in any mixture of
JVM-based interpreted languages such as Jython, JRuby, and BeanShell.
- Written using IBM's Eclipse and thus supporting further extendibility
via plugins.
- Supports any number of transparently interconnected servers running
interconnected 'virtual buildings'.

FVE work is now suspended because my last student has just graduated.
However, I think this model - flexibility, wide-ranging user
programmability, (preferably) platform independence, etc. applied in a
more complete way as a framework for collaboration and social
interaction (work teams and social communities). And a text-based
paradigm complemented by a virtual reality paradigm as used in QWAG
would make it even better because there are uses for both.

My questions, fuzzy and not well formulated in my mind, are: Is QWAG
going to be user programmable in Squeak if Squeak is at least partially
underlying its implementation? Is there room for the kind of work that I
am describing above as an open source project of some kind? It seems to
me that with the explosion of interest in work and social collaboration
this type of project could be of considerable interest.

Ivan

P.S. I have been retired for three years now and my access to students
is limited as is the time I can spend on a project such as this. I am
describing it to the community more as a project idea.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Andreas Raab
> Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 2:37 AM
> To: Croquet-dev; The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: [squeak-dev] Interesting blog post
> 
> Hi -
> 
> I'm sure some people here will be interested to see this:
> 
>    http://cogblog.mirandabanda.org/
> 
> Go Eliot! ;-)
> 
> Cheers,
>    - Andreas
> 
>