Bringing LoLs to the Web: JavaScript, OMetaJS, and the Web Workbench

Part 4 in the Language of Languages series.

While Squeak Smalltalk was instrumental for rapid prototyping, it presented adoption hurdles: Smalltalk was less common in university curricula, and requiring users to download a Squeak image created high friction. To make LoLs broadly accessible, we migrated the core workbench to run natively in web browsers using JavaScript and OMetaJS.

Moving to a browser-native stack eliminated setup barriers, allowing developers to experiment with custom parsers, context checkers, and projectors directly in their browser.

Try the workbench and explore the code

• Interactive tool: Open the Workbench to launch the web environment.
• OMetaJS engine: Source code for our OMetaJS adaptation is in the LoLsOMetaJS repository on GitHub.
• Browser workbench: The user interface and language environment are in the LanguageWorkbench repository on GitHub.

Next in the series: Expanding LoLs Capabilities: The JNode Environment and LoLsServer.