Why is this project needed?
Sugar includes lot many activities that are targeted for children's learning. But the yet to be explored avenue is the Web. This activity will add to learning activity base using which children can learn something new. It is basically a web application project editor that allows you to develop web application as a whole consisting of web pages, scripts, images,etc. It will impart knowledge through examples for each web page widget on how each plays its role in HTML pages, Javascript and on the whole how web sites are developed. Also, this will prove fruitful with respect to classroom perspective where teachers and mentors can impart good knowledge to children through this activity. Also, it is planned in our roadmap to develop a small website hosting server as part of activity thus allowing children to deploy their web application and share it with others. Collaboration is the most fundamental aspect we imbue in children from early age. DevelopWeb emphasizes collaboration and it will assist you in this. DevelopWeb will provide functionality to allow children to work on same web application or project from different locations over the network. Teachers or mentors can assign web projects as assignment to group of children allowing them to work and learn at same time.
Locally?
No, this project is not limited to local scope. This project has Global scope. It can be used anywhere in the world. Internationalization support will be provided in this activity so that children in any geogrpahical area can use this activity to learn web development with ease.
In the greater OLPC/Sugar community?
Yes, the need for this project can be sensed by the fact that there is no activity in the catalogue that caters purely to web development. One of the feature include a web server component to host the web site/ application performing some operation. This can be used to host web application that can serve to client's request. So this activity can be used to invoke service by client even in regions where there is no boradband/3G/internet/network converage. This can be used by other developers, contributors to host their web services or application which interacts with their activity to get data processed by the service.
Outside the community?
Yes, the need for this project outside the community can be clearly seen by the functionality it is serving to you. Like popular web development IDEs in Windows and Linux based OS, DevelopWeb will prove to be on the same lines for Sugar Environment. The most promising aspect is that it can be used by teachers and mentors to teach various concepts of web development to children varying from creating basic web sites to creating complex web application. Through this activity children will be benefited the most as they will get one stop provision to develop any website or web application by using technology of their choice. Colloboration is the main theme in DevelopWeb such that children can simultaneously work on same web project using this. Also, this activity will encourage other contributors to think on the lines of web development and cloud in near future.