Mozilla Releases Cloud-based Coding Platform

By Greg McNevin

February 19, 2009: Mozilla is pushing its development tools into the clouds, announcing its first cloud-based collaborative development framework, Bespin.

Named for the floating city in Star Wars, Bespin takes a leaf out of Google’s application book and shifts the software the open source foundation uses to develop popular software such as Firefox from the desktop to the cloud. This enables more seamless collaboration, and if it achieves its vision, will one day facilitate live coding sessions according to Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, the heads of Mozilla’s Developer Tools Labs.

“As a challenge, we wanted to take on an interesting project that you would normally thing of as a desktop application, and see if it would fly on the Web,” writes Almaer. “Being developers, why not develop something that we know and use every day. Our code editor.”

The application can be accessed from any compliant browser, and while this release is more a preview than a finished app, Mozilla says that the 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.

As with all open source apps the foundation is calling for user input to see what works, what doesn’t, and to help the project evolve.

Developers and all other interested parties can check out Bespin now at bespin.mozilla.com.

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