Labs/Bespin/Roadmap/Reboot

Bespin Reboot 2009

We have a new project to reboot Bespin, building on the knowledge that we have gained from the experiment so far. The goal is to allow us to build a solid foundation for the community at large to build on.

We have a different schedule for the reboot, which is:

• Weekly meetings, building to in person week
  • September 4th; flushing out the high level goals
  • September 11th
  • September 18th
  • September 25th
• In person: Week of Sept 28th
  • Bringing in consultant to help build on SproutCore
  • Use the week to decide if SproutCore Is It

High level principles for Bespin

What are the guiding principles for Bespin?

• Platform for developer tools
• Embedded component is a first class citizen
• Provide a fantastic editor user experience
• Support for local file access and multiple backends
• Giving users 'social coding' to inform of others' work and avoid duplicated effort
• Providing a simple but powerful UI using a graphic-assisted command-line

What are un-goals?

• Provide a UI toolkit
• Use canvas
• Be everything to everyone

What are tactical things we want to fix?

What have we learned from Bespin that we don't want to mimic:

• Use a framework
• Events are great, but not too many. They're for saying that something happened, not for requesting action
• One system for keyboard handling
• Embedded component must be a first class citizen else it gets left behind
• Tests, tests, tests
• Prototypes, prototypes, prototypes
  • We jump to implementation too fast
• Plugins, plugins, plugins
• Documentation, ...

What is our software development process?

• How do we do design?
  • Do we need to agree on a drawing package like OmniGraffle?
• How do we work together?
  • Do we do code reviews?
• How do we prototype?

How do we work with the community?

• How are we inclusive?
• How do we deal with contributions?
• How do we reward the community?
• How do we grow the community?

What does the architecture look like?

• What does the model look like?
• Does Bespin become a single page app? (no front page, dashboard, login)
• Do we use the concept of "states" to go between LOGIN and COLLABORATING?
  • ties into login being part of the main app and not the page before
• How does the embedded editor component fit in?
  • Do we build bespin.mozilla.com with the embedded component itself?
  • Does it depend on SproutCore? or standalone?
• The system works from a session which can be tied to an account
  • Tie into Mozilla ID (which is OpenID) ?
  • Allows anonymous/no account access
• Multiple backend provider support baked in
  • Multiple servers
  • Include support for local file access
• Do we require the concept of "projects"?
  • Ramifications for:
    • wanting to quickly edit a page (create hidden project?)
    • wanting to search across a set of files and grouping operations (e.g. compile)

What infrastructure should change?

• SproutCore is git friendly, maybe the time to switch? :)