Mozilla Skywriter

Last updated
Mozilla Skywriter
Icon bespin M.gif
Developer(s) Mozilla Labs
Preview release
0.9a1
Operating system Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Type Code editor
License MPL [1]
Website mozillalabs.com/skywriter

Mozilla Skywriter (formerly Bespin [2] ) was a Mozilla Labs project aiming to create an open, extensible, and interoperable web-based framework for code editing.

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. A software framework provides a standard way to build and deploy applications. A software framework is a universal, reusable software environment that provides particular functionality as part of a larger software platform to facilitate development of software applications, products and solutions. Software frameworks may include support programs, compilers, code libraries, tool sets, and application programming interfaces (APIs) that bring together all the different components to enable development of a project or system.

Contents

As of January 2011, it has been merged into Ajax.org's Ace and Cloud9 IDE projects. [3]

Ace is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript. The goal is to create a web-based code editor that matches and extends the features, usability, and performance of existing native editors such as TextMate, Vim, or Eclipse. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and as the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter project.

Cloud9 IDE an online integrated development environment

Cloud9 IDE is an Online IDE, published as open source from version 2.0, until version 3.0. It supports multiple programming languages, including C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript with Node.js, and Go.

Name

The original name was a reference to Bespin, the fictional gas giant from Star Wars where "Cloud City" is located, [4] which relates to the cloud computing nature of the project.

Bespin fictional gas giant planet in the Star Wars universe

Bespin is a fictional planet, a gas giant in Star Wars films and books. The planet was first seen in the 1980 feature film The Empire Strikes Back. Since its introduction, Bespin has gained more specific characteristics in the Star Wars expanded universe.

Gas giant Giant planet which mainly consists of light elements such as hydrogen and helium

A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Gas giants are sometimes known as failed stars because they contain the same basic elements as a star. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System. The term "gas giant" was originally synonymous with "giant planet", but in the 1990s it became known that Uranus and Neptune are really a distinct class of giant planet, being composed mainly of heavier volatile substances. For this reason, Uranus and Neptune are now often classified in the separate category of ice giants.

<i>Star Wars</i> Epic science fantasy space opera franchise

Star Wars is an American epic space-opera media franchise created by George Lucas. The franchise began with the eponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon.

In a time preceding the 1.0 release the name of the project was changed to Skywriter due to "many compliments and complaints" over the previous one. This new name also holds a reference to coding in a cloud environment. [2]

Features

Skywriter encourages a more shared environment where data can be accessed from any machine. [5] This allows developers to collaborate on projects through a unified interface accessed through a web browser, no matter where they are physically located. [6] The application is available to anyone after free registration on the website. [7]

User interface means by which a user interacts with and controls a machine

The user interface (UI), in the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, whilst the machine simultaneously feeds back information that aids the operators' decision-making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls, and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology.

Web browser software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web

A web browser is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. Each individual web page, image, and video is identified by a distinct Uniform Resource Locator (URL), enabling browsers to retrieve these resources from a web server and display them on the user's device.

Skywriter currently supports syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, C#, C, Ruby, JavaScript and Wiring (used by the Arduino platform). [8]

Syntax highlighting Tool of editors for programming, scripting and markup

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature facilitates writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and syntax errors are visually distinct. Highlighting does not affect the meaning of the text itself; it is intended only for human readers.

HTML Hypertext Markup Language

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for web development. It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Related Research Articles

JavaScript programming language

JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, interpreted programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification. JavaScript has curly-bracket syntax, dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions.

Integrated development environment software application used to develop software

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse, contain the necessary compiler, interpreter, or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and Lazarus, do not.

A source-code repository is a file archive and web hosting facility where a large amount of source code, for software or for web pages, is kept, either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to handle various versions. They help developers submit patches of code in an organized fashion. Often these web sites support version control, bug tracking, release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based documentation...

Mercurial cross-platform, distributed revision-control tool for software developers

Mercurial is a distributed revision-control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS and Linux.

HTML Tidy is a console application for correcting invalid hypertext markup language (HTML), detecting potential web accessibility errors, and for improving the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. It is also a cross-platform library for computer applications that provides HTML Tidy's features.

TurboGears

TurboGears is a Python web application framework consisting of several WSGI components such as WebOb, SQLAlchemy, Genshi and Repoze.

Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is a free text editor for dynamic programming languages. It was introduced in January 2007 to complement ActiveState's commercial Komodo IDE. As of version 4.3, Komodo Edit is built atop the Open Komodo project.

Aptana

Aptana, Inc. is a company that makes web application development tools for Web 2.0 and Ajax for use with a variety of programming languages. Aptana's main products include Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer.

Google App Engine Serverless application platform for apps and backends

Google App Engine is a web framework and cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers. App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.

In FOSS development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications. A forge platform is generally able to host multiple independent projects.

zembly

Zembly was a browser-based development environment from Sun Microsystems that enabled social programming of applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone web applications, and other social platforms, as well as web widgets. Users of zembly interacted with one another via zembly's social networking features to engage in co-development of applications for these platforms. It was available from 2008-2009.

Firefox Sync, originally branded Mozilla Weave, is a browser synchronization feature that allows users to partially synchronize bookmarks, browsing history, preferences, passwords, filled forms, add-ons, and the last 25 opened tabs across multiple computers.

Bitbucket is a web-based version control repository hosting service owned by Atlassian, for source code and development projects that use either Mercurial or Git revision control systems. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts. It offers free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories as of September 2010. Bitbucket integrates with other Atlassian software like Jira, HipChat, Confluence and Bamboo.

Gitorious

Gitorious was a shared web hosting service for collaborative free and open-source software development projects that use the Git revision control system. The name also refers to the free and open-source server software that the Web site is developed and hosted on. According to the Git User's Survey in 2011, Gitorious was the second most popular hosting service for Git, with 11.7% of respondents indicating they use it, behind 87.5% using GitHub. On 3 March 2015, Gitorious was acquired by GitLab, who announced service through gitorious.org would be discontinued on 1 June 2015 and encouraged Gitorious users to make use of its import tools to migrate projects to GitLab.

Gerrit (software) free web-based team code collaboration tool

Gerrit is a free, web-based team code collaboration tool. Software developers in a team can review each other's modifications on their source code using a Web browser and approve or reject those changes. It integrates closely with Git, a distributed version control system.

Rust (programming language) systems programming language

Rust is a multi-paradigm systems programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance.

Servo (software) experimental layout engine developed by Mozilla and Samsung

Servo is an experimental browser engine developed to take advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the Rust programming language. The project was initiated by Mozilla Research with effort from Samsung to port it to Android and ARM processors. The prototype seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which many components are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks.

CodeMirror

CodeMirror is a JavaScript component that provides a code editor in the browser. It has a rich programming API and a focus on extensibility.

References

  1. ↑ Dean, Sam (2009-02-13). "Mozilla's Bespin Delivers Open, Collaborative Cloud App Development". Ostatic. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  2. 1 2 Dangoor, Kevin (2010-09-02). "Bespin is now Mozilla Skywriter, moves to GitHub". Mozilla Labs. Retrieved 2010-09-03.
  3. ↑ Dangoor, Kevin (2011-01-18). "Mozilla Skywriter has been merged into Ace". Mozilla Labs. Retrieved 2011-02-15.
  4. ↑ Broersma, Matthew (2009-02-17). "Mozilla shifts code development to the cloud". ZDNet UK. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  5. ↑ Shanklin, Stephen (2009-02-13). "Mozilla Bespin tries taking coding to the cloud". Cnet news. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  6. ↑ Pash, Adam (2009-02-13). "Mozilla Bespin Is a Killer Web-Based Text Editor". LifeHacker. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  7. ↑ "Mozilla Bespin" . Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  8. ↑ "Bespin Syntax Files". Mozilla Labs. Retrieved 2010-01-16.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.