Direct Web Remoting

Mozilla: Go Open Web, Go Mozilla Google: Go Google, Go Open Web Apple: Go Apple Microsoft: The others are teh suck The spam got too much, so I've turned comments off, you can reply via Twitter.

Practical reasons for thinking that Flash is dying: You can't get flash on an iPhone, iPod or iPad IE9 looks like it could get HTML5 video Idealistic reasons why Flash should be dying: The spec is controlled by a single entity. The Flash ... [More] wire-format is binary. View-source is important. The Flash runtime can't be fully open-sourced due to patent encumbered codecs. It's obvious, but you can't beat a good venn diagram: The Idealism isn't having much effect. Apple There's a parallel post to this one, with the subject being the iPad instead of Flash, and that it's a Bad Thing when you're not allowed to tinker with devices that you own. Idealistically the world would wait until something Chromey, Androidy, WebOSy or Maemoy came along out of principle. But we all know that's not going to happen however much we complain. Shame really. All the talk is for nothing. Also on Twitter [Less]

Recently I've been working on adding collaboration features to Bespin, Mozilla's web code editor. Today they're getting pushed out into bespin.mozilla.com. Enhanced collaboration is one of the best reasons to do an IDE on the web. It’s possible in a ... [More] traditional IDE or code editor, but there are lots of features of a web based editor that make it an obvious thing to do on the web. Our new collaboration feature is still fairly new, and like the rest of Bespin, still fairly beta, but we’ve got it working in Firefox, Safari and Chrome right now. We’ve released a webcast showing it off here: Taking it for a spin Want a go real quick? Here are the steps: Sign up or login to Bespin. Press CTRL+J/CMD+J to open the command line. Type 'follow joewalker' to get someone to share files with. I've shared a project called pubproj globally. Type 'project list'. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects. Type 'set collaborate on' to turn on shared editing. Open a shared file by typing 'open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt'. Or, in one graphic: You should then be in a collaborative editing session with the rest of the Internet. Click on the collaboration icon (2 people) in the top right hand corner show you who's editing with you. How it Works There are 2 parts to what's new. Firstly there's a way to decide who you want to share stuff with and secondly there's the shared editor. We’re adding 3 or 4 new commands: follow/unfollow: allow you to decide whose shared projects you want to see in your project navigator. We've gone for a lightweight Twitter style model so it's easy to get started. As we evolve Bespin this will become a way to get all sorts of information about the people you are working with group: allows you to put the people you are interested in into groups to make it easy to manage sharing share: allows you to export your projects read-only or editable to individuals, groups, or to everyone Expressing an interest in someone is as easy as “follow username”. You can then group these users together to make sharing easier. So for me to add Kevin, Ben and Dion to a group, I would do “group add mozlabs Kevin ben dion”. Grouping people like this is totally optional, but it will make maintaining sharing rules a lot easier going forward, when you’re working on a number of projects. Then if you want to share a project in read-only mode, to someone that is following you, you just type: “share add projectname username”. Replace username with groupname to share with one of your defined groups, or with “everyone” to just throw everything wide open. To allow editing you add “edit” to the end. So for ultimate wiki-like promiscuity: “share add projectname everyone edit”. Projects shared to you by people you follow will now show up in your file-explorer, or you can edit them from the command line. Type “load /owner+projectname/path/to/file”. Future Extensions We’re currently using Mobwrite to provide the diffing and synchronization with some additions to allow us to share collaborator information. We’re hopeful that we will be able to share collaboration systems with a number of other editors in the future. Various developers are working on plug-ins for GEdit, Eclipse, emacs, etc. Other things that we’re working on include plans for a quick share mode where you can grab a URL post it to an IRC session and instantly be in a shared edit session with the other IRC users. We've also been discussing in-page chat. We've left it for now because many Bespin users will already have IM or IRC or even Skype or similar, and we want to do something smart with the chat transcripts other than just throwing them away. Next we’ll be working on getting smooth undo so you have a time machine that can smoothly walk through changes from the current revision back in time through recent saves, and into VCS history, and then into a more lightweight collaboration where when 2 people have 2 check-outs of 1 file, they can both see each others changes to reduce merge pain, without directly affecting each others work. [Less]

When I was fresh out of college, my first job was working for the OpenGroup, and my command line looked something like this: In 2009, fired by the white heat of years of cutting edge research and development, my command line looks a lot more like ... [More] this: To be fair, we've now got transparency, anti-aliasing, our shells now do better completion. But that's about it for changes. Considering how much the rest of the industry has changed, that's shockingly glacial. For the past week or so, I've had the privilege of working on the Bespin command line, and I think there's a lot that we can do to make things better. This is what my Bespin command line looks like now: This post is all about how we can make command lines better. The core of the unix command line philosophy seems to be: small programs and pipe. There’s a lot to be said for loose coupling but there are some drawbacks as well... Zsh I love Zsh, and love the fancy completion that it does. Basic file completion has been around since ksh, IIRC: $ ls [TAB] Applications/ Mesh/ Projects/ Desktop/ Movies/ Public/ Documents/ Music/ Sites/ Downloads/ Parallels/ backup/ Library/ Pictures/ bin/ But zsh can complete against more than just files: $ telnet [TAB] 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.12 download.directwebremoting.org download.dojotoolkit.org getahead.org hg.mozilla.com localhost people.mozilla.com sandbox.dojotoolkit.org svn.directwebremoting.org Zsh knows that you don’t telnet to a file, so it completes against hosts (Does anyone know where that host list came from BTW?) Zsh also knows about other commands: $ git [TAB] add -- add paths to the index apply -- apply patch on a git index file and a work tree applymbox -- apply patches from a mailbox applypatch -- apply one patch extracted from an e-mail archimport -- import an Arch repository into git bisect -- find the change that introduced a bug branch -- create and show branches checkout -- checkout and switch to a branch cherry -- find commits not merged upstream cherry-pick -- cherry-pick the effect of an existing commit clone -- clones a repository into a new directory commit -- record changes to the repository ... That list of commands is the result of a 'git help' command, but that's not what I typed. Zsh has been doing something funky behind my back when I pressed [TAB]. Zsh can do different things depending on where in a command you are: $ git add [TAB] Applications/ Mesh/ Projects/ Desktop/ Movies/ Public/ Documents/ Music/ Sites/ Downloads/ Parallels/ backup/ Library/ Pictures/ bin/ My point, is that, whilst all of this is very clever, the implementation is also insane. In order to make this work, the zsh guys have had to reverse engineer every single unix command (or at least all most of the ones that I use). And any time those commands change, then zsh is going to have to change too. It's very useful, and I'm glad that zsh has done it, and they probably didn't have much of a choice, but this way of going about things is not the Best Idea ever. I'm sure somewhere the bash guys are working on the same feature themselves, or maybe they've already done it. I don’t care - it just strengthens the point about the lunacy of the situation. The Unix philosophy of small programs and pipe has a lot to be said for it, but there are serious drawbacks too. Here's some of the ways that we're innovating when it comes to the Bespin command line, and benefiting from being about to integrate things better. GUI integration Traditionally you've had a set of shells (bash, zsh, etc) that work in a set of terminal emulators (xterm, terminal, gnome-terminal, konsole, etc) But there's so much more you could do if you had one program do both. In Bespin: If you click on an old command, it gets copied to the prompt (the blue highlight is a mouseover). If you double click it's re-executed. Output is not restricted to ascii in a grid. We (predictably) use HTML. Error output is visually different to normal output You can minimize or maximize output (the help output has been minimized above) - I hate it when a vcs diff operation takes up 4k lines of scrollback obliterating what I wanted to see. There's no reason why you couldn't do this in Unix (or even Windows). I don't think you’d want such a gui-shell as your login shell, but since its use is very much from within a GUI, that's OK - you’d probably launch it from the GUI anyway. In Bespin we don't have pipes yet, but would it be neat to be able to inspect a pipeline visually as it's working, I'm sure it's possible with a gui-shell. Linking Output to Commands We link the output from a command to the command that created it. The obvious effect is that output from slow running commands no longer gets confused with what's happening now. The 'slow' command is just something I hacked up to demonstrate asynchronous behavior. A nice upshot of this is that we can implicitly add & to the end of every command, and you no longer have to wait for anything. In essence, each command has it’s own separate stdout, which goes to it’s own div. Maybe there is a reason why unix shells don’t do something similar. Would it mean shells being curses based or something? Command Meta-Data With the exception of the reverse-engineering of the command line structure done by zsh, the integration between commands and the shell is limited. In Bespin, a command is a structure like this { name: 'createproject', takes: ['projectname'], preview: 'create a new project', usage: '[newprojectname]', execute: function(commandLine, projectname) { /* code to do the work */ } } This means that we can provide help as the user is typing. The idea is that TAB will guess what you want to do at all times. This ties in a lot with GUI integration too. If the command line knows that the next parameter is a file, when the user presses TAB without typing anything to complete on, we can offer a dialog to allow selection of a file, and so on. This isn’t about forcing the user to switch to the mouse, but it is about allowing better feedback from the system about what options are available. We've only really got started with this part - there’s a lot more work to do. I hope we'll be able to do some of the funky GUI integration that Ubiquity has been pioneering. Attention Guides There's a lot to look at on any command line, I want to find ways to keep the most important bits in front of your eyes at all times. I'd like to expire older commands more intelligently than a standard terminal (oldest dies first), Commands are more important if: They are still in progress They keep being re-executed They are waiting for input etc We've only basically started on this right now, with the ability to hide/show output, but there's potential for it to make the command line lots more usable. Plug-ins Linking everything together is easy if you make one big monolithic lump. That's not the plan - we're evolving a plug-in strategy as we go, and planning on making as much of Bespin itself use the plug-in system. The key to coupling is to get the right level of coupling. Status Messages My other integration obsession is about status messages. There's a huge amount we could do to integrate the familiar concept of "what are you doing now" with commit messages, bug trackers, chat, and team tracking. More soon. What other things could we do to trick out the command line? [Less]

The DWR project has a new lead developer - We've just closed a unanimous vote that declares David Marginian to be the new lead. David had been around DWR since the beginning, and has been consistently one of the most helpful people on the mailing ... [More] list, and has contributed to many areas, most particularly the documentation. Q: Why? Because David is already doing a better job of leading DWR than I am, and because for a while I've had too many projects on and been trying to do a better job of less things. Q: Am I gone for good? No, I certainly don't intend to disappear, and I've still got a lot of love for DWR - this is mostly just me admitting that I'm not the best man for the job, and that DWR deserves better. Q: What are you doing instead? Quite a bit of Bespin. Oh, and like everyone else, I'm excusing my lack of blog activity to the whole 140 char thing. It's a cheap excuse, but if everyone else can use it... I'd like to thank the David, and the whole DWR community for helping make DWR a success. [Less]