Open Wonderland marks first anniversary with free workshops

Open Wonderland — an open source, Java-based virtual world platform — marks the first anniversary of the project’s founding on March 11.

Open Wonderland was originally Sun’s Project Wonderland, but support was discontinued and project staffers laid off in early 2010 after Sun was acquired by Oracle.

Since then, the group has created a foundation, launched a website, and gained new adherents.

(Image courtesy WonderSchool.)

For example, the WonderSchool project brings the Alice animation program right into the Wonderland environment to help students learn programming.

The reason is that Wonderland allows outside applications to be brought right into the virtual environment.

To help users learn their way around Wonderland, the platform’s volunteer community will be offering free workshops for users and developers the week of March 22.

Nicole Yankelovich

“The first two workshops are geared towards newcomers,” said project leader Nicole Yankelovich in the announcement. “One focuses on end-users who want to learn to build Open Wonderland worlds and the other on Java developers who would like to get started with Open Wonderland development.”

There is no charge for the workshops, but space is limited, and registration is required.

Maria Korolov