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Bespin brings IDEs to Cloud City


By Alex Handy
February 23, 2009 — 
When Mozilla hired the two men behind Ajaxian last year, the plan was to base an entire developer tools lab around the pair. When SD Times last spoke to Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith late last year, they only had an inkling of ideas. But now these two men released the fruits of their labor: Bespin.

Named after the planet on which Lando Calrissian's Cloud City is based in the Star Wars universe, Bespin is a Web-based IDE focused on a future of cloud computing.

While Web-based IDEs are nothing new, Almaer said that this is the first such offering to be written in the languages that it supports. That means developers can modify and extend this fledgling open-source project with the same AJAX-focused techniques and code that the IDE is built to edit.

“We wanted to build a tool that open Web developers could feel is their own,” said Almaer. “On the technology side, [Bespin is] written in the same technology as it uses. They can customize the tool using the same tech they use to get their job done. We find that that's often not the case [with IDEs]. We wanted to make this a really open environment. This is one of the reasons we put out this release so early, to see what the community wants to do with it and how we should tweak it.”

And despite the youth of this release, developers have already begun to push Bespin into new areas. One open-source developer has already tied Bespin to a headless Eclipse server. This IDE mashup provided Bespin as the editor, while the Eclipse engine crunched and examined the code dynamically on the back end.

“The example they were giving in the demo was editing Java source files and having Eclipse tell Bespin there were errors on line 22 or whatever,” said Almaer of the Eclipse work.

“This is a feature we really want to explore. If you have this editor in the cloud, what could the cloud be doing? Right now, we're kind of limited in what the desktop can do. But in the cloud you can go and analyze the code for the entire project and send that info down to the user. We thought about playing around with heuristics.”

Such algorithmic supports could be crunched in the cloud, giving desktops less to do and providing coders with deeper dynamic vision into their software as it's being written.

Right from the start, said Galbraith, Bespin was built to be responsive. “The first thing we focused on was performance,” he said.

“We created a new editor from scratch using a new feature in HTML 5: the canvas tag. We rolled from scratch all the things that make up an editor. We found [that] by doing that, we were able to get pretty impressive performance. We haven't really found an upward bound for performance. We tried files upwards of 150,000 lines.”

Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that Web-based IDEs have not historically earned much respect. “In general, Web-based IDEs haven't gone anywhere in the last five to 10 years. That doesn't mean I'm down on them,” he said.

“The reason for that is the nature of what the IDE is for. I'm thinking that an IDE that's for Web development has a much better chance of succeeding. The one claim I would point to is Firebug. Everybody I talk to in JavaScript is already debugging in the browser. That gets me thinking to situations where the code that's being developed is best rendered and activated in a browser. That's where I think you might see the browser-based IDE.”


Related Search Term(s): Bespin, cloud computing


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33289
 

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