webbased scripteditor - news and reviews
by Steen Nielsen on 18.02.09
"Great minds think alike", a quote which comes to mind, when I think about my small project on building a webbased scripteditor. I found out about another similar project a few days ago, named Bespin by Mozilla , it can be found on the Mozilla Labs project pages and I must say that it really is an interesting project, a lot more interesting than my own feeble attempt.
Using HTML 5.0 technologies
The Bespin project is using technologies, which will be coming to us very soon, at least if you are keeping your browser up to date. The biggest difference from any other text-editor out there is that it uses Canvas, a technology that have been avaiable in Firefox, Safari and Opera for some time now. Canvas have been part of the HTML 5.0 draft specs for some time and most browsers have already implemented it, of course, Microsoft have not yet put it in their browser.
To manipulate the canvas, insert text and colorize the functions, variables and all the other textstrings, JavaScript is used. And you have to admire the work that they have done to make it perform at the speed it does, even with very large files. In the video, they work with a document that is several thousand lines long, without any delay when editing the text.
Ben Galbraith explains a lot more about the project on his blog . It is definitely worth a look if you are a webdeveloper. Although Bespin is still under development, and probably will be for some time, it is impressive to see what we can use the upcoming technologies for.
About my own scripteditor
I'm probably not going to complete my webbased scripteditor. It's not that I find it to be a competition, I just haven't got the time currently to develop on it. I might continue my own editor later, but right now it is on hold. I can recommend following the development progress on the Bespin project instead.