Few questions regarding the ACE and Skywriter collaboration

[karuna]

Hi,

I've read through the discussions on this group regarding the
collaboration between ACE and Skywriter/bespin teams. However, I've
got a few questions; the answers to which are not very clear to me.

Having the ACE and bespin/skywriter team collaborate, does it mean
that bespin/skywriter would have DOM rendering like ACE does? or would
it still continue with the canvas rendering?

If yes, would there be any other differences between ACE and bespin/
skywriter apart from canvas rendering?

Just to confirm, the collaboration means that - some of the core
infrastructure code (eg. plugin system, CLI, etc) would be shared
between ACE and bespin/skywriter. Is this right?

--karuna

[Kevin Dangoor]

Hi Karuna,

I'll put some answers inline below, but any details you could possibly want are there in the source...

https://github.com/mozilla/ace

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:01 PM, karuna <karuna...@gmail.com> wrote:

Having the ACE and bespin/skywriter team collaborate, does it mean
that bespin/skywriter would have DOM rendering like ACE does? or would
it still continue with the canvas rendering?

Our current plan is to use ACE's DOM rendering only. It's certainly possible that someone could make a canvas-based renderer that can step in place of the DOM renderer, but I don't see much reason to do so.
 

If yes, would there be any other differences between ACE and bespin/
skywriter apart from canvas rendering?

It's basically a packaging thing. Skywriter (as Bespin 0.9 before it) is an easily embeddable, customizable editor component for your webapps. It includes ACE, dryice, pilot and cockpit which, taken together, do what Bespin 0.9 did but with a simpler plugin architecture, better command line and more featureful DOM-based renderer.
 

Just to confirm, the collaboration means that - some of the core
infrastructure code (eg. plugin system, CLI, etc) would be shared
between ACE and bespin/skywriter. Is this right?

My last answer takes care of this question, too, I think.

Kevin


--
Kevin Dangoor

work: http://mozilla.com/
email: kdan...@mozilla.com
blog: http://www.BlueSkyOnMars.com

[karuna]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks. Got one more question:

I'm trying to understand as to why we are dropping the canvas
renderer? Accessibility is one issue which is not straightforward with
canvas, what could be the other reasons?

Importantly what would be the performance implications of switching
the renderer?

--karuna

On Dec 22, 11:22 pm, Kevin Dangoor <kdang...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Hi Karuna,
>
> I'll put some answers inline below, but any details you could possibly want
> are there in the source...
>
> https://github.com/mozilla/ace
>

> On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 1:01 PM, karuna <karunasag...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Having the ACE and bespin/skywriter team collaborate, does it mean
> > that bespin/skywriter would have DOM rendering like ACE does? or would
> > it still continue with the canvas rendering?
>
> Our current plan is to use ACE's DOM rendering only. It's certainly possible
> that someone could make a canvas-based renderer that can step in place of
> the DOM renderer, but I don't see much reason to do so.
>
> > If yes, would there be any other differences between ACE and bespin/
> > skywriter apart from canvas rendering?
>
> It's basically a packaging thing. Skywriter (as Bespin 0.9 before it) is an
> easily embeddable, customizable editor component for your webapps. It
> includes ACE, dryice, pilot and cockpit which, taken together, do what
> Bespin 0.9 did but with a simpler plugin architecture, better command line
> and more featureful DOM-based renderer.
>
> > Just to confirm, the collaboration means that - some of the core
> > infrastructure code (eg. plugin system, CLI, etc) would be shared
> > between ACE and bespin/skywriter. Is this right?
>
> My last answer takes care of this question, too, I think.
>
> Kevin
>
> --
> Kevin Dangoor
>
> work:http://mozilla.com/

> email: kdang...@mozilla.com <k...@blazingthings.com>
> blog:http://www.BlueSkyOnMars.com

[Fabian Jakobs]

Hi Karuna,

I'm the author of ACE. I cannot tell you the reasons for Mozilla to
switch to ACE but I can tell you my motivation to use a DOM based
approach:

- IE support (probably less important for Mozilla)
- hackability/ease of implementation
- ability to use CSS for theming
- speed (it is easier to get it fast)

In terms of speed ACE was always on par or even faster than Bespin in
my unscientific tests. Though performance variations between different
browsers is with both approaches fairly high. I still have some ideas
to further improve the performance.

Best,
Fabian

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>

[David Mulder]

Aside of that I would like to add that I have recently switched from Skywriter to ACE and have to say that ACE is superior in so many ways (especially small details which never worked in bespin/skywriter) that I suppose the dropping of the canvas renderer is mostly a side effect of switching to ACE rather than a reason on itself (though I of course don't know). 

 Btw, is there an ACE mailing list/group? Cause I haven't found one and need some help finding the scroll offset in ACE. Or should we simply start using this mailing list for ACE related questions?

 David

[Kevin Dangoor]

Hi David,

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 5:39 AM, David Mulder <greats...@zoho.com> wrote:

Aside of that I would like to add that I have recently switched from Skywriter to ACE and have to say that ACE is superior in so many ways (especially small details which never worked in bespin/skywriter) that I suppose the dropping of the canvas renderer is mostly a side effect of switching to ACE rather than a reason on itself (though I of course don't know). 

ACE has a bunch of great aspects to it, and I think that getting Bespin's plugin system, customizability and other features on top is going to be awesome to use.
 

 Btw, is there an ACE mailing list/group? Cause I haven't found one and need some help finding the scroll offset in ACE. Or should we simply start using this mailing list for ACE related questions?

 

You can ask here or on the Cloud9 list. Fabian is here and now there are others on the skywriter list with experience hacking on ACE as well.

Kevin

--
Kevin Dangoor

work: http://mozilla.com/

email: kdan...@mozilla.com
blog: http://www.BlueSkyOnMars.com