This Week in Bespin (Feb 23)

by Kevin Dangoor

I’m crossposting this from the Bespin googlegroup.

Before moving on to the week that is coming, let’s look back at the week that was:

Week of February 17th:

  • Version 0.1.2 of Bespin was released. Notable changes:
  • System clipboard copy and paste now works in WebKit. Firefox will almost work. Vote up this bug:   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407983 
  • Project names now need only to be unique per user. Previously, they had to be globally unique. This reflects a bit of a change to how we were viewing collaboration. (More on collaboration to come).
  • Thanks to that change, the sample project has been renamed from SampleProjectFor:yourusername to just SampleProject.
  • Speaking of project renaming, you can now rename projects from the dashboard or the editor using the “renameproject” command. New ”createproject” and “deleteproject” commands make project-level changes much clearer.
  • Every user now has a visible “BespinSettings” project. You probably      won’t be surprised to hear that it stores settings for Bespin! You can put custom code (set autoconfig on and put code in config.js) and commands (use the cmd* commands) in there.
  • The login form is now a real form, which means that your password manager can save your Bespin login information.
  • Client and server implementations can make sure they’re in sync with the X-Bespin-API HTTP header that is returned from the server. The current API version is 2 (which adds the renameproject API).
  • key repetition works for arrows and backspace and lots of other minor fixes.
  • As Dion noted, Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi coupled the Bespin Editor with a headless Eclipse . The screenshot showing Java compiler warnings within Bespin is worth at least a couple thousand words!
  • Jerome Velociter got the Bespin editor running in XWiki . Avi Bryant hooked the dashboard and editor up to Squeak :. It’s been amazing to see the integration going on so far.
  • Oscar Carballa kicked off the creation of a User Guide for Bespin
  • Mozilla’s Joe Walker started working on the collaboration spec. The model that he’s looking at is designed to allow you to share a project with many people and give them access to view it/collaborate on it in different ways. So, you’ll be able to selectively use collaborative editing with some people, do a “webcast” style sharing with others and more.
  • Three more google groups have been announced: bespin-core covers the development of Bespin’s code, bespin-dev is for people who want to develop extensions for Bespin. Community member Guilherme Santos created the bespinbrasil group for Brazilian Bespin users.

    • Coming up this week:

    • Ben and Dion are in Miami for Future of Web Apps where they will be showing off Bespin.
    • Joe is continue to work on collaboration and is experimenting with Neil Fraser’s mobwrite.
    • I will finally be getting to work on the version control spec, and hope to be starting on the version control backend code.
    • And we’re all going to be working on bug fixes and minor enhancements.