Mozilla Skywriter was a Mozilla Labs project aiming to create an open, extensible, and interoperable web-based framework

Software framework

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by user code, thus providing application specific software...

 for code editing

Source code editor

A source code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs by programmers. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment ....

.

As of January 2011, it has been merged into Ajax.org's Ace

Ace (editor)

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...

 and Cloud9 IDE projects.

Name

The original name was thought to be a reference to Bespin

Bespin

Bespin is a fictional planet, a gas giant in Star Wars films and books. The planet was first seen in the 1980 feature film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back...

, the fictional gas giant

Gas giant

A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...

 from Star Wars

Star Wars

Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...

, which relates to the cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 nature of the project.

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.

Features

Skywriter encourages a more shared environment

Collaborative workspace

A collaborative workspace or shared workspace is an inter-connected environment in which all the participants in dispersed locations can access and interact with each other just as inside a single entity....

 where data can be accessed from any machine. This allows developers to collaborate on projects through a unified interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

 accessed through a web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

, no matter where they are physically located. The application is available to anyone after free registration on the website.

Skywriter currently supports syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature of some text editors that display text—especially source code—in different colors and fonts according to the category of terms. This feature eases writing in a structured language such as a programming language or a markup language as both structures and...

 for HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, CSS

CSS

-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...

, PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, C#, C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

, JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....

 and Wiring (used by the Arduino

Arduino

Arduino is an open-source single-board microcontroller, descendant of the open-source Wiring platform, designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible. The hardware consists of a simple open hardware design for the Arduino board with an Atmel AVR...

platform).

External links

• Skywriter source-code repository (official) by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith at Google I/O 2009
• Bespin source-code repository (old)
• Change log
• http://www.cloud9ide.com