Ben Galbraith, Ajaxian.com co-founder

Ben Galbraith is the co-director of Developer Tools at Mozilla and the co-founder of Ajaxian.com. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve.

He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, and software industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and five children.

Presentation: "Bespin: Social Code Editing on the Web"

Track: Browser as a Platform

Time: Wednesday 11:45 - 12:45

Location: Olympic

Abstract:

Many of us feel that the Web platform has enormous potential over the next few years to become *the* dominant application development platform. While some would argue that it already is, there are still large classes of applications for which browsers appear to be unsuited.

Earlier this year, a team at Mozilla Labs set out to blur the supposed boundaries separating the Web from "desktop" platforms; a result of this effort is Bespin, a web-based code editor. By using the relatively new "canvas" element (introduced by Safari, standardized by the WHATWG, and now available in nearly every modern browser) Bespin creates its own text editing component that performs extremely well-- much better than anything before seen in the browser while offering syntax highlighting and other key features expected of modern code

editors.

But Bespin is more than a technology demo; it ambitions to transform how we write code by making it fundamentally social and much more productive.

Join Ben and Dion, the founders of Bespin, as they discuss the project's past, present, and future.