2009-02-17

Hello Bespin

 Last week Mozilla announced Bespin - the web development environment.

 Bespin is a web-application, you install it on your server. In a private domain I suppose.

 Its entirely written in javascript and instead of writing directly to the DOM it uses the not so-recent-but-not-very-popular-anyway canvas DOM element.

 They actually implemented a canvas/javascript GUI toolkit for this application, namely "Thunderhead"

 What's hot?
 - Portable environment.
 - Real-time collaboration over the net.
 - Project management for free.
 - Streamlined extensibility, extensions are installed with a single click.
 - Ubiquity like commands (i mean Quicksilver/Katapult/Launchbox/Launchy/Do/Krunner style)
 
 Now, the first concern for a javascript editor is, is it fast? It looks fast in the screencast, in fact they brag a lot about the speed provided by canvas.

 But that was running in a clean Safari, my heavily extended Ubuntu Firefox was sluggish as hell.

 Now Mozilla neglects Fiefox in Linux and I know I'm running too many extensions. I could install Epiphany but being a Mozilla product I can't believe they aren't going to laverage that advantage.

 On the other hand in Windows I have no option but Firefox, except closed source Opera.

 On an slithly unrelated note Epiphany-webkit crashes as soon as I try to visit any website so that's outta question too.

 I can't help but compare it to KomodoEdit. KomodoEdit has been my editor for over 2 years and I love it, but the open source version is stalled on features, and may never grow them as it eats into the market  of its closed source parent KomodoIDE.

 If Bespin gets more of the code inspection features that KomodoEdit is lacking I'll definitively switch, with the amusing implication that I'll have to use either multiple profiles or different browsers for bespin and my web surfing because of sluggishness.
 
 But with the new that Firefox 4 Will try to use artificial inteligense and natural language processing I think I'll finally leave Firefox after so many years.

0 msgs: