Posted 09/28/09 at 05:46:17 PM by Jason Barry

Palm hooked a couple of Mozilla’s finest developers to work on the Palm’s WebOS. Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith will leave their posts at Mozilla where they worked with the Developer Tools Lab. 

Almaer and Gailbraith are well known for their work with JavaScript, Ajax concepts, and web development ideas. The two were also behind the web editor Bespin, an open source cloud-based web editor. With their new positions at Palm they’ll be expected to improve the WebOS and the community surrounding it, in hopes to increase software for the platform.

Almaer goes into more detail as to his personal motivations behind taking the position on his blog. Talking about his previous position he says he’d like to “thank the Mozilla community and look[s] forward to continuing to work for the Open Web.”

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Posted 02/16/09 at 09:47:16 AM by Paul Lilly

Everyone of late has big plans for the cloud, including Mozilla, who on Thursday launched an open-soure project called Bespin. The basic idea behind Bespin is to offer a web-based programming framework that brings together the speed of desktop-based development with cloud computing. While in very early form, Mozilla has set some high-level goals for the project:

• Ease of Use - the editor experience should not be intimidating and should facilitate quickly getting straight into the code.
• Real-time Collaboration - sharing live coding sessions with colleagues should be easy and collaboratively coding with one or more partners should Just Work.
• Integrated Command-Line - tools like vi and Emacs have demonstrated the power of integrating command-lines into editors. Bespin needs one, too. 
• Extensible and Self-Hosted - the interface and capabilities of Bespin should be highly extensible and easily accessible to users through Ubiquity-like commands or via the plug-in API.
• Wicked Fast - the editor is just a toy unless it stays smooth and responsive editing files of very large sizes.
• Accessible from Anywhere - the code editor should work from anywhere, and from any device, using any modern standards-compliant browser.

As it stands now, Bespin 0.1 is just an initial prototype framework with support for basic editing features like syntax highlighting, undo/redo, previewing files in the browser, and other low-level tasks. In the long-run, Mozilla hopes to "empower web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own."

Developers who want to give the early prototype a whirl can access the Bespin demo here.

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