Great to see LK come up here. Yes, the approach of Lively goes towards what is mentioned in the article, right now however, the client session (what you run in the JS VM in your browser) is what the image is for Lively. We developed a persistence mechanism that will read/write a JS object graph so that your working state of your session can be saved and resumed, just like a Smalltalk image [1].

We are currently experimenting in distributing LK runtimes in nodejs instances so that basically a network of active runtimes can be created that communicate / exchange objects.

Note that the core development moved to github [2].

[1] http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media/...

[2] https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel

Snap is also worth a look:

http://snap.berkeley.edu/init

(it's a semi-port of MIT's Scratch language).