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Friday, September 7, 2007

Komodo Spawns New Open Source IDE Project

Development tools vendor ActiveState is opening up parts of its Komodo
IDE in a new effort called Open Komodo. Komodo is a Mozilla
Framework-based application that uses Mozilla's XUL (XML-based User
Interface Language), which is Mozilla's language for creating its user
interface. With many IDEs already out in a crowded marketplace for
development tools, Open Komodo's use of Mozilla's XUL may well be its
key differentiators. The Open Komodo effort will take code from
ActiveState's freely available, but not open source, Komodo Edit product
and use it as a base for the new open source IDE. The aim is to create
a community and a project that will help Web developers to more easily
create modern Web-based applications. In February 2007, ActiveState
released a free version of its flagship Komodo IDE called Komodo Edit,
and that release was a prelude to going open source. Open Komodo is
only a subset of Edit, though.The longer-term project is something
called Komodo Snapdragon. The intention of Snapdragon is to provide
a top-quality IDE for Web development that focuses on open
technologies, such as AJAX, HTML/XML, JavaScript and more. Shane
Caraveo, Komodo Dev Lead: " We want to provide tight integration into
other Firefox-based development tools as well. This would target
Web 2.0 applications, and next-generation Rich Internet Applications.
A XUL-based application uses all the same technologies that you would
use to develop an advanced Web site today; this includes XML, CSS and
JavaScript. This type of platform allows people who can develop Web
site to develop applications. So, I would say that this is an IDE that
Web developers can easily modify, hack, build, extend, without having
to learn new languages and technologies."

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