Mozilla bespin

Mozilla Bespin is an experimental development of Mozilla Labs, which has already been written about on the hub The next version 0.4.4 was released, which added the ability to work together on code. The experiment of this thing, I recall, is that it is made using HTML 5 and "lives" completely in the browser. In my spare time, I decided to try this thing together with my friend (what is the use of trying the joint development tool alone :)).

Brief introduction

After going through a simple registration process, I saw this (this and the following pictures are clickable): This, in fact, is the editor itself. In addition, Bespin also has a file manager that displays all the projects and files of these projects, and a completely wonderful console with a decent set of commands and auto-completion. She, of course, is still damp: not all promised teams are supported. However, the idea itself is interesting and I (like my friend) really liked it. A complete list of commands (and generally quite a lot of useful information) can be found here .

Teamwork

Actually, for the sake of which everything was started. In general, this is my first experience using such tools (not counting Google Docs - but I never used them for this purpose). Of course, I am aware that there are various kinds of services for joint editing of source texts, but, as far as I know, Bespin is one of a kind.

The collaboration option is currently disabled by default for security reasons. However, you can enable it “at your own peril and risk” by the team set collaborate onor through the editor’s interface. Then, with the team, follow %username%you can add this% username% to the list of users with whom you can work together, and with the command share add %projectname% %username%add the user the right to work with the project. Then you can stick to work.

The editor during editing displays the cursor position of each user. At the same time, despite the beta status, everything runs very well: the cursor moves smoothly, text updates almost without delay appear where necessary. The only problem arose: for some reason, Bespin did not immediately edit the file, duplicated the tab and the possibility of editing magically appeared.



By the way, it is with this and another glitch that it is explained that there are so many cursors on the screen (although there were two of us): Bespin incorrectly processed the exit from the editor and thought that the user was still editing the file. Moreover, if the user immediately went from the neighboring tab (or just refresh the page), then he appeared again. So we became a lot :).

Conclusion

Bespina can make an extremely interesting product for working together on projects (for working alone it makes no sense, I think so). Especially for those working with the web - they can start using Bespin right now, since there are irreplaceable syntax highlighting (html, css, js), the ability to execute js in the console. In addition, thanks to the svn client, the transition will not be painful - you can continue to work in the repository out of habit.