OLPCities/Introduction
If you are thinking to begin programming 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 a "simulator". It's easy. If you work under Windows XP there are the tutorial: Using QEMU on Windows XP .
A good idea is to try that your application works in the OLPC station and in the Internet Explorer. Many kids in the world will not be included in the OLPC project and would use you application under Windows.
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 Basics of programming or JavaScript concepts, but we will create links to these paralel subjects.
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.
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 API Reference).
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:
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 OLPCities JavaScript Libraries.
Please note that all contributions to OLPCWiki 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.