Thanks for the Bespin contributions; Eclipse, XWiki, and more

Chris Beard

4 responses

There’s nothing that humbles you quite like when you see people build on your work. Although a week hasn’t gone by since we introduced the Bespin project to the wider community, we have already seen contributions that have gone beyond our expectations.

Boris Bokowski, of the Eclipse community says it best:

Within a few days, 30,000 people logged into their public server, 400 people joined their discussion group, about 50 bugs were filed, several of them with patches, and many articles, blogs and even a Wikipedia entry were written.

We wanted to highlight Boris himself. Along with Simon Kaegi, he managed to accomplish something we think is very cool indeed, and all in a couple of days. He took Eclipse and paired it with Bespin. What does that mean? He took a headless Eclipse, implemented the Bespin Server API and went above and beyond the API to get data from Eclipse back to Bespin.

Take a look at the integration in action:

bespin-eclipse

Here Eclipse is sending back errors and warnings about the Java source file being edited. This is great news for Java fans and beyond (as Eclipse supports many languages and platforms these days).

Then we have Jerome Velociter who kindly spent his Saturday integrating Bespin with the open source XWiki project. He added an “Edit with Bespin” button on Wiki pages, and then when you are done and save, it goes back to XWiki.

Both the XWiki and Eclipse work is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping for with the Bespin project. Having just enough code out there for us all to collaborate, but not too much of a formed product that has anything set in stone.

We also want to thank the other contributors that have been hanging out on irc, emailing the newsgroup, filing bugs and ideas, and of course contributing code.

We have been hard at work getting more and more information out there, from roadmaps to known issues to help on how to contribute code. We don’t just want the coding to be done in the open. We want the entire discussion to be open, and this will of course include design decisions, so expect to see design documents on the Wiki as key features come up in the community. The goal is for this project to be your editor.

— Dion Almaer, on behalf of the Bespin development team

4 responses

  1. Darren wrote on :

    On the back of fantastic work, could there be a full framework like SWT or Swing, but based on Canvas?

    This would be the killer to apps in the browser. Having an entire application built using this framework would be stellar 🙂

  2. Luca Mauri wrote on :

    Great job guys, the project is just brilliant. I hope it will grow to a full-fledged IDE very shortly!

    Since I modestly am the user who started the Wikipedia article mentioned in this entry, I just have one last thing to say: give us a lot to write about 😉

  3. Oscar Carballal wrote on :

    Thanks to your team! It has been a while since I didn’t get involved in a project, and this was ‘the one’ to contribute. I’ve already set the base for the User Guide, by the way 🙂

  4. Tristan wrote on :

    Great to seek my friends over at XWiki playing with Bespin. (Ludo: your team is great!)