ScriptX and the World Wide Web

"Link Globally, Interact Locally"

by Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs

Benefit of ScriptX to Web Browsers

The World Wide Web is an excellent way to distribute cross-platform interactive multimedia ScriptX objects. The Kaleida Media Player, running on net-surfing Mac and Windows platforms, can dynamically load in and plug together objects from "title containers" transferred over the web.

ScriptX title containers are portable files containing ScriptX objects, code and media: text, images, animation, sound, MIDI, music, movies, and modular object-oriented programs that plug together dynamically to orchestrate open-ended interactive multimedia experiences.

You can publish self-contained multimedia ScriptX titles (i.e. applications, tools, games, catalogs, presentations, documents), as well as reusable ScriptX objects (i.e. modular components, accessories, characters, places, clip-art, plug-ins, SimProducts), so people can download the ones they want, and compose and interact with them locally, on their own computers.

Web browsers such as NetScape can be configured to use the Kaleida Media Player (KMP) as a "helper application", so it's simple for people with NetScape and the Kaleida Media Player to download and interact with ScriptX objects: just click on a link to a title container, and it's distributed over the network and dynamically loaded into the Kaleida Media Player, where it comes to life!

ScriptX Pizza Demo

The ScriptX Pizza Demo, at "http://www.kaleida.com/official/pizza", lets you construct a pizza by plugging together ScriptX objects from several title containers delivered via the World Wide Web. First you select a pizza crust in one title container, then you can select any number of pizza toppings in separate title containers. They're dynamically loaded into the KMP and locally composed in a window, that you can interact with by dragging the toppings around on the crust. There's even a "big brother" spinning eyeball topping, that animates as you move your cursor around the screen!

This demonstrates network distribution of cross platform code and media, with local interactivity, direct manipulation, animation, dynamic binding, and plugging together objects from different containers.

There is an extension to ScriptX on the Mac that enables it to ask NetScape to open any URL, so ScriptX can cause NetScape to display a web page, load another title container, and even send messages to interactive web services (like submitting an order for a pizza).

ScriptX Web developers will go far beyond mere pizza toppings, publishing innovative interactive experiences on the network, no longer limited to the static text, graphics, and forms of HTML.

Benefits of ScriptX to Web Developers

As a general purpose object-oriented multimedia scripting language, ScriptX has many uses for web developers. It can import and export various file formats, index, search and manipulate multimedia databases, automatically generate HTML from macros and templates, draw and composite images and produce corresponding image maps, and serve as an open ended programmable hypermedia synthesizer.

For example, the ARPANet Map, at "http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/arpanet/index-large.html", is a web of html, gif images, and image maps, all synthesized off-line by ScriptX from an abstract topological graph of the network.

Future Directions

As described above, there are many interesting things that can be done by distributing files generated off-line by ScriptX, including title containers, HTML pages, images, and image maps. This can be taken much further by using ScriptX as an interactive on-line web server, synthesizing distributed hypermedia on demand!

There is an experimental extension to ScriptX on the Mac that enables it to be used with MacHTTP as a "Common Gateway Interface" server. It's possible to link to a running ScriptX program, that dynamically interprets URLs and forms results, and generates responses on the fly.

ScriptX can produce and respond to web pages with forms and pictures (buttons, scrolling lists, text fields, and clickable images), that most web browsers support. We have developed an experimental framework of classes for generating HTML from ScriptX objects, and programming interactive Web services with forms, macros, and high level HTML widgets with clickable images. It's possible to implement image maps that send events directly back to the ScriptX presentation and model objects that rendered them. Example web services that have been implemented with this framework include class and generic browsers, and a scrolling zooming image browser.

Conclusion

ScriptX deeply satisfies an important unfilled niche in the World Wide Web: it makes it possible to implement and distribute high quality cross platform interactivity, far beyond the static HTML forms and text formatting capabilities of current Web browsers. In the long term, ScriptX is the ideal framework for developing open-ended, extensible Web servers and browsers, distributed hypermedia authoring tools, multi-user colaborative online services, and compelling online store fronts, games, and educational experiences unlike anything that's been done before!