OLPCities/Introduction
If you are thinking to begin programming for the project OLPCities or any other web applications for OLPC you need to know some things.
The OLPC station has a browser that is a customized version of Firefox. But this doesn't means that, if you test some web application at your Firefox at Windows, by example, it will work at the station.
Our recomendation is that you install an "emulator". It's easy. If you work under Windows XP there are the tutorial: Using QEMU on Windows XP .
You can use what you will see at these tutorials serie for the creation of a "OLPCity" but you can have other ideas. The JavaScript libraries we will put available and explain how to use, has the potential for many different creations.
We will not explain in the main tutorials serie (this that you are reading now) the JavaScript basic concepts, but they will be at appendices.
We need to alert you that JavaScript, like we will use it, is not a "safe" language. Everybody can see your code. But we think that, here, this is an advantage, because your code can help other people to learn how to develop something similar.
It's usual to say that that Object Oriented Programming is like LEGO. You use some prefab objects compounding your application. Here this will be more true because we will have, not only many Classes to use but also many "sprites" (images) free available for download from this wiki.
OLPCities has an API, the "libraries" having Classes with methods, properties etc. You can access this API at: OLPCities/JavaScript Libraries.
We will work initially using three main JavaScript libraries:
- the "native" JavaScript library, that has Classes like: String, Math etc.
- the DOM (Document Object Model), that has Classes like: Document, Window etc.
- some Classes of the Gamelib, created by Scott Porter and updated by Brent Silby. Gamelib is available under the terms of the GNU Library General Public Licence. Some Classes of Gamelib don't work at the OLPC station browser (we will not publish them at the OLPCities/JavaScript Libraries).
We hope that many new libraries will be created and made available for this project.
And we have the "sprites". We are not designers, so we hope that, soon, we will have nicer sprites.
The sprites are distributed in some categories. You can access and copy them at:
If you create a new sprite you can put your work at these pages, available for the communitary use of it.
If you created a new "Lot" you can put the link at the page Lots. A Lot can have words in any language (english, spanish etc.)
The same for new libraries. Use the OLPCities/JavaScript Libraries.
Please note that all contributions to OLPCities are considered to be released under the Attributions-ShareAlike 2.5. If you don't want your work to be used by everybody then don't submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote or have designed it yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!
Like english is not our first language, if you found some errors at the text of any tutorial, please replace it by the correct.
We hope you will enjoy our tutorials and will help in the creation of many useful activities for our kids.