Last week, in my post about the open source Adobe Automated UI Tester for Adobe ActionScript, I mentioned another project called Brackets. Today, I’m going to share some thoughts around this new “open source code editor for the web”.
One of the things I find really intriguing about Brackets is that the editor is built upon the technologies it was built to edit. We are, of course, talking about HTML & Friends: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In effect, the editor can be used to edit itself. Kind of a weird concept, but as I said; intriguing. Since Brackets itself consists of un-compiled source files, it will need to run in either a web browser or through the supplied thin application layer – currently built upon CEF/Chromium.
Another interesting note is that this is a fully open source project which anyone can contribute to, fork into a new project, and otherwise just totally mess with. Even though the project was started by and had been somewhat directed by Adobe engineers – the idea is that this is not an Adobe product and that it is truly meant for the community to take this project and run with it. In fact – looking over at the Trello board for this project, one can see the extent of involvement even at this early stage.
Download the code from: https://github.com/adobe/brackets
YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/codebrackets
Extension Guidelines: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Extension-UI-Guidelines
Twitter: @brackets
Some may wonder why I’m taking the time to write about something that has little to do with Flash technology, since that is my main focus. While I am a huge advocate of the Adobe Flash Platform, I have always held that Flash and HTML & Friends can and should co-exist and even assist in the growth and direction of one another where appropriate.
This stuff is all related, and during the last 10+ years of working with Flash, I doubt that a week has gone by where I was not also engaged in web standards as well. It all falls under the same net and I wouldn’t want to be restrained to only one side of this coin. There are some great initiatives going on around this technology; Adobe Edge, Adobe Shadow, Brackets, and more.
We definitely need better tooling for the web. I am happy to see it all finally happening!