Wonderblog

In Sun Labs, we know the summer is really ending when our intrepid interns start heading back to school.  This year is unfortunately no exception, and our current intern Antonio, is heading back to New Mexico.  While we have more interns starting soon, we are certainly going to miss Antonio.  Before he leaves, we've asked him to post an update on his work this summer.  This guest post was contributed by outgoing intern Antonio Arredondo, a PhD student in computer science at New Mexico State University.

Today completes my internship at Sun Microsystems on Project Wonderland. I was tasked with creating a low-end client for Project Wonderland, and that is what I have accomplished (a working version).

I took the Web 2.0 approach of creating a AJAX application that would interact with the Wonderland server, via a web server (Glassfish/Tomcat). I started by looking for a AJAX framework that worked with Java, and found DWR. This project allowed me to use Comet (long lived connections) to send information between my web client and the Wonderland server.

Once the communication framework was chosen, I created a simple web page that would handle the map view. The map view uses the idea of having a over-head view of the world, and placing an icon to represent each person logged in. As the person moves, the icon gets updated to the new position.

Once this was finished, I decided that making a mobile version would be an easy extension. The mobile version consists of making the map view fill the entire web page, while keeping the menu at the very top. I was able to accomplish this by writing specific CSS and Javascript for the mobile browser, while maintaining as much common code for both desktop and mobile browser.

Wonderland has now become more accessible to those users that do not currently have the necessary 3D hardware to run the GUI client. The web client, both desktop and  mobile version,  represents another step in Project Wonderland's goal of providing a scalable multi-user environment.  If you would like to try it out, you can check it out for yourself.  Just check out the lg3d-wonderland and wonderland-modules source using the "webui" branch.

I want to thank Sun Microsystems for the opportunity along with Nicole, Paul, and the rest of the Project Wonderland Team.