Running the SqueakJS Debugger in Lively

Prerequisites

You need to have git and docker available on the machine that should host Lively. See Lively Docker for more details.

Install and Run Lively

Now build and run Lively:

./start.sh

The script will first build a docker image using the Dockerfile in this directory. To rebuild it, run docker build --rm -t squeakjs-lively .

Then the script creates a directory LivelyKernel in the base folder if no such folder exists yet and will clone the LivelyKernel repository into it. Additionally, it will pull down the PartsBin from lively-web.org. If you want to use an existing Lively install just copy it into this LivelyKernel folder before running start.sh.

Please note: the start.sh script will take a few minutes to run the first time around. This is completly normal, just hang on ;)

After the setup steps are done (a message along the lines of Lively server starting... appears in the command output) you will be able to access Lively at http://localhost:9001/welcome.html

Run and Debug SqueakJS

The whole SqueakJS directory is mapped into the LivelyKernel directory at users/SqueakJS/

Open http://localhost:9001/users/SqueakJS/lively/squeak.html to run the visual debugger. Use Lively's System Browser to modify the VM source code by navigating to users/SqueakJS. When you accept a method in the browser, the file on your disk will be modified.

How it works

All the SqueakJS VM files are loaded into Lively by the squeak_lively.js entry point. This is a module that gets loaded by the SqueakMorph's loadSqueakJS() script in lively/squeak.html. That morph implements the platform support code similar to the stand-alone squeak.js one, but using Lively facilities.