This Week in Bespin March 2, 2009

Mar 2, 2009 14:32 · 356 words · 2 minute read

For the week of February 23rd:

  • Roberto Saccon ported Bespin to Dojo! Dojo leader Peter Higgins helped to clean things up a bit. This has significantly changed (and improved) the use of namespaces in the frontend code, which will make Bespin much easier to drop into other pages.
  • For people keeping score at home, there is now a 0.1 branch in the Bespin repository that we will be using to update the server. The default branch has the Dojo work and all of the other forward-looking work going on. Until the trunk work stabilizes a bit, bespin.mozilla.com will be running a bit behind on the changes here.
  • autoindent setting. When you hit return/enter you’re placed at the same indentation point on the next line.
  • Select an area and hit TAB and it all indents. SHIFT+TAB and it unindents. Thanks to Jay Bird!
  • Special support for certain keys so German keyboards etc can get in ‘{‘ and the like. Thanks to Julian Viereck  
  • For people following the trunk/tip, the project build script has changed a bit. Be sure to follow the instructions in the top-level README file to get the Bespin server running.
  • PHP, Java and Aduino syntax highlighting, thanks to Sean Burke and Olle Jonsson, respectively. The Arduino support is optional. Use include(“bespin.syntax.arduino”); in your config.js to load.
  • Multithreaded development server, which speeds up page loads a bit now that there are more modules loading.
  • Config work has short cuts now so you can simply use: include(file), execute(cmd), publish(), subscribe() 
Coming up the week of March 2nd:
  • I’ll be working on backend changes to make VCS integration possible (and to allow us to start using Bespin as our primary editor when working on Bespin itself)
  • Joe will be working on collaboration implementation
  • Ben and Dion will likely have their hands full just keeping up with your patches! (I’m sure they will sneak some time in to improve the editor and Thunderhead as well 🙂

By the way, “This Week in Bespin” is not just for those of us at Mozilla. If you have anything you want to see show up in these summaries, just send me an email message!