Mozilla pushes code editing to cloud

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Feb 2009 at 08:58

The Mozilla Foundation's Developer Tools Lab has released its first project, a web-based collaborative code-editing framework named Bespin.

The leaders of the project, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, admitted they were inspired by projects such as Google Apps, which have shown how desktop-centric tasks such as word processing can be shifted to the web.

"As a challenge, we wanted to take on an interesting project that you would normally think of as a desktop application, and see if it would fly on the web," says Almaer in a developer's blog post. "Being developers, why not develop something that we know and use every day? Our code editor."

Though Bespin is an early prototype the ultimate goal is to allow real-time collaborative code editing sessions, according to Almaer, though functionality is currently limited.

"The initial prototype framework... includes support for basic editing features, such as syntax highlighting, large file sizes, undo/redo, previewing files in the browser [and] importing/exporting projects," Mozilla notes in a statement.

Bespin also supports Ubiquity commands, and the team is now looking to more fully integrate the two. Ubiquity allows users to type natural language phrases into the browser to perform certain tasks, and the team is now adding a number of helpful code-editing phrases to the app. Ubiquity is also being folded into Firefox 3.2.

As Bespin is a browser-based code editing tool, anybody can use it regardless of their hardware or operating system, so long as they have a standards-compliant browser.