Mozilla Labs Bespin and Jetpack

In the first half of this decade I was working as a web developer and really enjoyed it. I mainly used Microsoft ASP at that time. Sadly the company I worked for was slowly getting out of the web business as new management stepped in and after surviving many lay-offs, I finally fell victim. This left a bad taste in my mouth about web programming and I now have a position where I don’t do much web at all. I’ve done some XHTML here and there, but for the most part I have stayed away from it.

So the other day I was browsing programming news and ran across news about Jetpack from Mozilla Labs. I thought, hmmm….that sounds cool, what is it? I followed the link to the Jetpack site and read up. From the site: “In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.” I read comments about it being like Grease Monkey, but it is a little more than that. Not only can you enhance the web site, but the FireFox browser itself. Jetpack allows you to use Javascript, HTML and CSS to do this. That is very cool!

While going through the Jetpack tutorial I was editing code in the browser. I had Firebug running, so I used it to find out how this was possible. The code said Bespin. After researching this I found out that Bespin was an experimental code editor that worked inside the browser and was launched months ago. How I missed the launch of that I have no idea! This baby is in it’s infancy also, but wow, what potential! Check out the video and play with it yourself at the official Bespin web site. It is using javascript for the front end and it is fast! I love it and I can’t wait for them to improve it further. You can play with Bespin by registering at the web site, but you can also download the code and install it locally. But you will need to build it. All that information is found in the Bespin developer’s guide.

I found these two projects so awesome that I forgot all about the web programming funk I was in. I want to follow and work with these two projects more! They help put the fun back into the web!