Due to a number of technical problems that our team has experienced with the Cobalt build of OpenCroquet, it became apparent to us that it may be in our best interests to investigate an alternative software platform for building the iSocial prototype. Although Cobalt would appear to have a more elegant design, we are unfortunately bound by time constraints, limited manpower and deadlines. Cobalt just isn't mature enough at this point for us to continue building on top of it. Sigh.
We have to consider that our project will be used to teach individuals with Autism social skills. A buggy platform that is overly prone to crashing is not facilitative of this goal - especially with our user population.
The only alternative was obvious - Sun's Wonderland.
I began to look into it last week. I began working with it and setting up a development environment this week. I have to admit that I am impressed. Extremely impressed. I was able to get the client and server software running on multiple platforms (WinXP and Ubuntu 8.04) in no time at all. I was able to install and configure a development environment on Ubuntu in an evening and completely build the source myself by midnight.
The developer community appears to be bigger and more active than with the Cobalt/Croquet project. My questions got answered sometimes in a matter of minutes, sometimes in a few hours. But it never took months like some issues I've posted to the Cobalt/Croquet mailing list. And, gasp, Wonderland actually has forums. It's incomprehensible to me that Cobalt/Croquet still relies on a mailing list.
So after building the source from the latest code contributions that I pulled from CVS, I took the software for a spin and was extremely pleased with what I found. Here's a video:
Looks great. I didn't even know it could share applications so easily like that, too. I'm really interested in exploring wonderland as well. Let me know if you ever want someone to test stuff out like the application sharing or whatever. My email is doug.holton@usu.edu (we emailed each other earlier).
ReplyDeleteI'll get a wonderland server up soon, too, although I'm busy with drupal stuff at the moment, and I might wait until the 0.5 wonderland when they have switched to jmonkeyengine, but I'll go ahead and download and try it out now.
Ah! Matt! So this is where you hang! I'm glad you made the trip to Wonderland, as we both have similar objectives! I am working with it to use within the prison system, supported by our Non-Profit "Community Success Initiative", based in Raleigh NC. We are going to have to run stuff by each other, as well as anyone else looking to create a better world through the use of Wonderland in an EDU setting.
ReplyDeleteMy take is that many people who are incarcerated do not do well in a traditional "reading/writing" setting. No, they are not stupid, they just learn through hearing or experience. So, with Wonderland, they can hear/see/experience the lessons presented in A/V format.
You are doing the "Good Work", Matt! Ric
iSocial looks extremely interesting. My 13 year old son was recently diagnosed with ASD. I'm a member of Sun's Wonderland team. If there is any way I can help in your investigation of Wonderland please do not hesitate to ask. I may not be able to answer your question directly but I can make sure that your question gets directed to the right person. Typically the best way to get answers is to post to the Wonderland forum. But if you're having trouble getting a response let me know at deronj@dev.java.net.
ReplyDeleteBTW: if you are going to experiment with X11 Shared Apps be sure to use the CVS trunk as of 6/20/08 or Release 0.4 (which is coming out soon). This has some very significant bug fixes for X11 shared apps which make a big improvement in quality. On the agenda for X11 shared apps in the future is performance improvement, drag-and-drop, better scalability, and direct Swing and JavaFX integration for better performance.