Sun hat Lively vorgestellt und es liest sich interessant:

The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a novel web programming environment developed by Project Flair at Sun Labs. The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to web programming that we have known in desktop programming for thirty years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have.

Motivation
The Lively Kernel places a special emphasis on treating web applications as real applications, as opposed to the document-oriented nature of most web applications today. In general, we want to put programming into web development, as opposed to the current weaving of HTML, XML and CSS documents that is also sometimes referred to as programming.
A key difference between the Lively Kernel and other systems in the same area is our focus on uniformity. Our goal is to build a platform using a minimum number of underlying technologies. This is in contrast with many current web technologies that utilize a diverse array of technologies such as HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, PHP, XML, and so on. In the Lively Kernel we attempt to do as much as possible using a single technology: JavaScript. We have chosen JavaScript primarily because of its ubiquitous availability in the web browsers today and because of its syntactic similarity to other highly popular languages such as C, C++ and Java. However, we also want to leverage the dynamic aspects of JavaScript, especially the ability to modify applications at runtime. Such capabilities are an essential ingredient in building a malleable web programming environment that allows applications to be developed interactively and collaboratively.

Schon interessant, was man heute mit ein “bischen” (10.000 Zeilen) LiveScript (heute auch als JavaScript bekannt :-)) und SVG anstellen kann. Gegenüber den kommerziellen Technologien wie Adobe Air oder Microsoft Silverlight (die beide ein Plugin benötigen im Gegensatz zu Lively) wirkt das alles natürlich noch wie ein sehr unausgereiftes Spielzeug. Aber vielleicht hat Lively ja das Potential, das einst LiveScript entwickelt hat… Es ist GPL Version 2, nutzt offene Standards und kommt mit einer sympatischen Bescheidenheit daher (“it must be understood that the Lively Kernel is an experiment and a research environment in its early stages, and at this point it is probably more appropriate for students, computing enthusiasts and even children than for, e.g., commercial web site designers.”) dass es einfach zum Experimentieren einlädt.