Mozilla Bespin Meetup

FND — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:53:42 +0000

Last night, some of my colleagues and I attended the Bespin meetup.
It was great hearing Ben, Dion and Joe – quite obviously very smart hackers – speak, and later getting a chance to join various discussions with them.

As before, I’ll settle for a few quick notes:

name
When asked about about the name (which had confused us), humorously dodged the question multiple times. Not entirely sure why…
reinventing the wheel
Bespin makes heavy use of canvas, essentially reinventing the rendering of text and layout (using their Thunderhead toolkit).
While contentious with regards to accessibility and web standards, this is necessary due to performance reasons.
(Note: Not JavaScript is the bottleneck here, but the DOM is.)
offline capability
Currently Bespin should be considered a “hosted application”, requiring a server-side component.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of relying on the “cloud” for my primary editor.
While the Bespin team is planning to use Titanium eventually, Joe said it shouldn’t be too hard to integrate TiddlyWiki‘s file-saving code (similar to the XWiki integration), essentially creating a stand-alone HTML application.
tools integration
Since Bespin runs in the browser, it might be hard to integrate external tools (e.g. PyLint).
I’m concerned that this might mean the respective server must support such applications, stripping away another bit of developer independence…
active community
There’s already an active community of hackers making use of and contributing to the project.
(We’re also considering using Bespin as a front-end for TiddlyWeb.)
Ubiquity as Firefox extension API
On a slightly unrelated note, it has been suggested that Ubiquity might be integrated into Firefox, which in turn could lead to a pure-JavaScript API for extensions (currently writing Firefox extensions involves a lot of overhead, e.g. creating XML documents). That would of course be most welcome!

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Mozilla Bespin Meetup