With a name like Mozilla Bespin you'd be forgiven for thinking they're referring to a certain planet in the Star Wars universe (the one where they mine Tibanna gas, and where Han was frozen in Carbonite).; but they're not - it's their new framework for a code editor.
Just as Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we hope to do the same with Bespin by developing an extensible framework for Open Web development. We're particularly excited by the prospect of empowering Web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own.
They don't really refer to it as an editor you'll notice, but rather an Open Web development framework. The aim of this framework is to make the editing of code easy, collaborative, accessible, fast and extensible. The idea is that it should help to move code editing away from the desktop and onto the web for what they refer to as cloud computing - so you can edit your code on any computer (there are obviously limitations here such as needing Firefox and Bespin installed, but they don't talk about them).
As you can see from the video they have a prototype ready that demonstrates the concept with a few implemented features such as syntax highlighting, support for large files, previewing and undo/redo. One of the key features that I like here though is that it's extensible and customisable, and it's done in such a way that you can share your customisations with other people and can easily switch back. Here's the big thing though, it's done entirely using web languages - they made it using the Canvas element from HTML 5.
I wonder how long it will be until Lucasfilm come knocking at their door for using a copyrighted name.
