Plans for the Playground?

[Jan-Pieter Jacobs]

I've been using the J Playground pretty extensively lately, and it is really a great resource. (Also a really great gateway drug for convincing new J'ers). However, I would recommend it, and use it in documentation (e.g. perma-links when explaining people things), even more often if I'd be sure it would stay (accessible and where it is) and be updated to more recent versions.

Therefore I wonder: what are the plans with the Playground? Will it stay at the same URL, or get a more memorable one (e.g. play.jsoftware.com ?).

I know there's been a lot of work going into the JHS guest server recently, but this would not suit e.g. use cases requiring confidentiality, or where no network is available, yet (company) restrictions prohibit installing third party software (see below).

That brings me to my second question: the first version of the playground that I saw (j701 still, I think) could be downloaded as a web-page in Chrome/Firefox, and used just opening that downloaded HTML. But the current 903 version does not allow this: when saved (complete webpage), the resulting HTML loads up, but J is not running, somehow.

It seems to be due to the binary wasm file being outside the folder of the HTML page, as Firefox's Developer tools mention the following errors as first ones:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at file:///home/jpjacobs/emj.data. (Reason: CORS request not http).

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at file:///home/jpjacobs/J%20Playground_files/emj.wasm. (Reason: CORS request not http).

I think it would be nice if this were solved, since it would allow using a local version to

- Avoid hammering the J software server (ok, most often a cached version would likely be used)

- Offline use (e.g. no or mobile-data-only connection, or perhaps security restrictions)

- Personal Archival of known-working J versions for tools written in J and saved locally as bookmarks.

Thanks,

Jan-Pieter

[chris burke]

It would be good to update the playground to J9.5, and perhaps also to
have a copy with the latest 9.6 beta. Note that we now make a wasm
build on github along with all the other builds, see
https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/releases/tag/build . Perhaps the
playground could be updated any time a new build is made.

The play.jsoftware.com url is good.

The first version was just an ordinary HTML page. It should be
possible to include the wasm in a local copy of the playground.

Could the playground or at least the wasm be supported by the wiki, so
that where appropriate, code in the wiki could be executed in a popup
window?