Google is working on an IDE inside Chrome, too. It's called Spark: https://github.com/dart-lang/spark
WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
141–150 of 154 posts
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#142This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist,…
From my experience, IDEs do not help in reducing the notion that programming is somehow "magic" - on the other hand, beginners will tend to develop an attachment to them, and that's where the "magic" shifts to. Basic concepts like "source code is just a text file" will be foreign to them (I'm surprised how many supposedly educated "developers" I've encountered don't understand this.) I think the best way to start wri…
True enough: bundling IDE with browser does not solve the problem, but it certainly lowers the bar for beginners to start programming.
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#143This is amazing work. I hope it continues to go even further. I'd like to see a browser that is really just implemented on top of a kernel with full programmatic access to everything from the top down: just as Emacs happens to be a text editor built on the elisp kernel, Firefox could happen to be a browser built on a web kernel. Everything that drives the UI are just functions that could just as easily be invoked fro…
You are pretty much describing the Firefox architecture. We are invoking Firefox UI code from scratchpad all the time when prototyping things. Some parts of the UI do not use standard Web APIs (e.g. XUL and XBL), as there are different opinions on how the web platform should evolve to fulfill those needs, but if you include all the experimental technologies to this web kernel, we are already there.
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a little bit like the early home computers. You could start writing code (basic) immediately after switching on the computer. Copy a few lines of code from magazine and see what it does.
The manual that came with the Apple IIc my family had when I was a kid included sections on programming the computer with Applesoft BASIC. What an optimistic thing to include in the manual that every user gets! And, yet, those were the first lines of code I ever typed into a computer and I'm still doing it 30 years later.
I remember small sections of BASIC in my school math book in something like 6th grade. We had a Mac with HyperCard so it looked really primitive to me :)
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. I can do this with Word, python -m SimpleHTTPServer, and a web browser to write code, test code and see code in live action. Wait, what is Word being used for, in this process?
Writing code. at least in open office you can create a new HTML document, don't have Word with me right now but in the old days I believe it was possible.
Well, you sure can save a Word document as HTML, but it spits out some of the grossest, most xml-metadata-crammed, non-human-readable HTML and CSS you have ever seen. God help you if you actually want to use Word as a WYSIWYG HTML editor. And have fun trying to add JS to it...
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#146This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist,…
> Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step. I... um, it's a first step we took 17 years ago, didn't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ is not as old (1996) but is also pretty cool. I wish they had more funding to explore that idea that the web should be editable (as long as you have the authorization to PUT).
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#147Looking forward to the new Pheonix when someone gets fed up enough with the current heavyweight Firefox to write it.
The challenge here is that Gecko is the heavyweight bit here, not Firefox. If you wanted to shrink the size of Firefox dramatically, you could not do so without removing Web functionality (as opposed to Firefox functionality.)
I'd love to see someone give that a shot. It was really three or four people who "Firefoxed" the old Mozilla Suite and there's nothing stopping some similarly motivated group from giving it a go.
Still, I don't think they'd get nearly as far as we did back in 2002 and 2003, because Firefox is actually very trim and fit. There aren't a lot of extra features to cut and the code implementing most features is smart enough not to waste resources when not in use.
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#148> We’re working on a protocol adapter that will allow > clients using the Firefox Remote Debugging Protocol – > including the Developer Tools and WebIDE – talk to all > mobile browsers, regardless of rendering engine or > runtime. Our first targets are Chrome for Android and > Safari on iOS. My company expects all of our internal web applications to function on the executives' iPads, but they refuse to purchase Macs…
Here's a crazy idea: what if we stop buying apple products until they stop pulling this walled garden crap and we are free to use the overpriced hardware we paid for as we damn please?
That sounds like lunacy. How is the world supposed to buy overpriced brush metal technology?
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
The democratization of the web gives people who have been consumers the ability to be creators. The tools of creation belong in everyone's hands.
And? That doesn't mean it cannot be a plugin.
If it was an extension we would lose stability because our devtools have unit tests that test against every Firefox change.
Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly
#150I've always wondered why developer tools are bundled with browsers. Shouldn't they be available as separate downloads as: 1. Most people use browsers compared to working with them for development, and 2. The additional tools just add to the package size and possibly increased resource usage (if they are running with the rest of the browser)? Thanks in advance for the replies.
Our devtools have unit tests that run for every tiny change that is made to Firefox. Building the tools in gives much more stability. We are also using and exposing a lot of low level Firefox stuff and fixing bugs as a result.
So in short you get a better, more extensible browser, more stability and the chance to take a look at how something you use every day works.
It's a win-win in my opinion.