Thursday, February 19, 2009

Exploring bespin - and porting it to dojo

After some months absent from blogging and open source software involvement, the launch of bespin motivated me to get back to fun-hacking and blogging. Bespin is a browser based code editor which feels and smells like a real editor (vim, emacs, textmate), and not like a form on a webpage as all of the other browser based code editors (including an experimental one I hacked together myself). Internally bespin uses canvas and therefore currently only runs well on Firefox or webkit nightly. As JS lib Protoptype was choosen, but that might change in favor of dojo. So I thought I will give it a try, to port bespin to dojo and learn about the internals of bespin. And it might serve as suggestion in case bespin officially gets ported to dojo.

So where we are so far ? The screenshot at right shows that dashboard canvas rendering halfway works already, but with scaling dimensions something went wrong. Prototype makes the simple things very simple, dojo doesn't care much about the simple things, so I had to hand code a few things which had ready-to-use counterparts in prototype. But the really ugly thing about Prototype based javascript development is the global name space pollution and the extension of native objects, that is so much better handled with dojo and its class system. Of course nobody cares about those details once an app is up and running. Will finish the port and submit it to bespin bugzilla, but it might take a few days to iron out the bugs.

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