Alan, I was able to get PEBL compiled via emscripten, circa 2013/14 maybe. Because of the execution model within javascript, this meant reworking the evaluator stack to be non-recursive, and this worked fine. But compiling doesn't equate to 'working'. There were some problems with the maturity of the SDL front-end libraries for emscripten which made it difficult to work around easily, and additionally some issues in interactivity--collecting responses, etc., that will require a similar refactoring of a handful of functions, especially the event loop. This is because javascript needs it to be 'reentrant', and PEBL is not. I was able to display simple screens and imagery in a browser, but decided that I needed to port PEBL to SDL2 before trying again. Now that this is done, I'm interested in revisiting this, as the emscripten library support for 2.0 is supposedly better, and the whole emscripten toolset is much more mature now. I agree that this would be huge, and the data storage/server capabilities could be adapted from a number of other toolkits if it gets to that point. I'll be looking for ways to make this happen now that 2.0 final is near release, and am willing to help out anyone who can round up a capable c++ programmer who is interested in getting this to work.
Shane On Tue, 2016-11-29 at 21:16 -0600, Alan Mead wrote: > Shane, > > Unless I've missed it, PEBL is still a desktop application that needs > to > be installed on a computer to run (i.e., it's not software for > creating > online studies). > > I'm not a C programmer but I was reading about asm.js and Emscripten. > My > understanding is that you compile a desktop application written in > C/C++ > code and support files to javascript that will execute at about half > speed in a browser. I wondered if this could be a way to use PEBL > online? I guess PEBL wouldn't be able to write data files but I > believe > PEBL has in-built capabilities accept Internet connections so you > would > just have to send all the data at the end of the experiment to a > simple > CGI designed to receive and store the results. > > Is this feasible? I ask because PEBL being a desktop application is > limiting to me. For example, when I was a faculty member, it was > difficult to get our technical support to install PEBL in the > computer > labs. It would have been easier to run PEBL (and run the latest > version) > to have it on my server that anyone could run in a browser. And now > that I'm not a faculty member, virtually my only access to data > sources > is online. > > -Alan > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Pebl-list mailing list Pebl-list@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pebl-list
