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JS-EDEN

A JavaScript-based variant of the EDEN interpreter - called JS-EDEN - is currently under development. JS-EDEN was first conceived and prototyped by Tim Monks as part of his MSc dissertation (2010-11). The current prototype was further developed in conjunction with Nick Pope, and is the subject of an open source development project. Relative to the desktop version of EDEN ("tkeden"), JS-EDEN has had much less testing and development, but there seem to be excellent prospects for re-engineering many of the models in the existing EM archive to work with it.

The JS-EDEN interpreter makes use of state-of-the-art features of browsers that have only recently become available in developments such as HTML-5. It exists in several variants:

  • The variant of JS-EDEN that was deployed in teaching in 2012 was that initially developed by Matt Cranham for the EMILE project in July 2012 - it can be found at http://jseden.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/emile/. This version of JS-EDEN runs best in an up-to-date version of Chrome.
  • A more advanced version of JS-EDEN, still in the process of development by Nick Pope can be found at http://jseden.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/master/. (For teaching purposes in CS405 in 2013-14, this link points to a version being further developed by Joe Butler.)
  • Antony Harfield has developed a variant of JS-EDEN that has been used to support teaching in Thai schools - see http://harfield.org.uk/jsedencanvas/.
  • A more basic version of the interpreter that does not require the latest browser features can be found at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~empublic/js-eden.

The current focus of development work in JS-EDEN is on the master version. A number of versions of the JS-EDEN master were developed by Joe Butler over the academic year 2013-14. His evaluation of JS-EDEN master was presented in his final year project report: Exploring Instruments for Online Empirical Modelling.

Instructions for installing a version of master that you can run locally without access to the web can be found here.

JS-EDEN is the prototype for the 'environment for making construals' that wil play a central role in the CONSTRUIT! project. This can be accessed at http://jseden.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/construit/. Tim Monks has recently consolidated the github repository for JS-EDEN to make it easier for other potential developers to contribute. A 'live' development version incorporating the latest features (which may be somewhat experimental in character!) can be found at http://emgroup.github.io/js-eden. Potentially more stable versions of JS-EDEN that have been subject to basic testing have also been released: for instance http://emgroup.github.io/js-eden-releases/v0.5.1/. The full list of releases is at http://emgroup.github.io/js-eden-releases/.

You can find out more about topical JS-EDEN development issues by subscribing to the Google group jseden@googlegroups.com.