The main site says this about the Lively Kernel project
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.
Basically it is Morphic [1] [2] crammed inside your web browser. I guess technology moves in interesting ways when such an interface can easily be duplicated in Javascript alone. It does tax your web browser when you play with it and some parts of the UI were cut off for me but I guess we’ll see where this takes things.
