This weekend I was going to implement one really simple & fast web enabled source code editor frontend. Such task in general seemed to be more or less trivial as I use source code editors all the time. So I started to mock up the proof-of-concept.
First an technology/platform should be selected on which the frontend will be written. Possibilities so far:
- Flash
- Silverlight
- Java Applets, Java FX & family
- HTML & JavaScript
Because Flash is widely distributed across the net – I’ve started mocking up the prototype right there, but after 1 day of trials, performance improvements & etc I ended up with something which wasn’t quite good as I expected:
http://wizartworx.com/hSourceEditorInstance.air (there is used optimized version of http://code.google.com/p/as3syntaxhighlight/ )
As you can see the end result isn’t fast enough to support hundreds of source code lines. So eventually flash platform isn’t suitable for implementation of robust fast performance code editor. So I questioned myself – what platform eventually will go further than its current state. Silverlight is great, Java too, but all of them actually are plugins and “workarounds” to features which web browser does not has. And with the ongoing HTML5 integration this “workarounds” actually won’t be needed anymore. And a proof for that is these path links which I’ve gathered during the research process:
demos:
- http://3.paulhamill.com/node/39
- http://www.whatwg.org/demos/2008-sept/color/color.html
- http://xant.us/ext-ux/lib/ext-3.0.0/examples/desktop/desktop.html
- http://jeko.free.fr/megapong/
- http://demo.nextapp.com/echo3csjs/
- http://glimr.rubyforge.org/cake/redesign.html
some highlight libs & editors/components:
- http://mihai.bazon.net/projects/javascript-syntax-highlighting-engine
- http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/
- http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/
- http://shjs.sourceforge.net/
- http://guillaume.bort.fr/textile-editor/index.html
frameworks:
- http://sproutcore.com/
- http://prototypejs.org/
- http://sizzlejs.com/
- http://www.extjs.com/
- http://www.gapjumper.com/
- http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/home.html
And many many more implementations on the pathway.
Conclusion
I’ll leave this section without stating my own opinion, but one is for sure -> HTML5 will change the way how browsers interact with the web, not by themselfs but generally as how developers implement it.