Dion Almaer, Ajaxian.com Co-founder

Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. For his day job, Dion co-leads a new group at Mozilla focusing on developer tools for the Web, which is something he has been passionate about doing for years, and is excited for the opportunity! Dion has been writing rich web applications from the beginning, and has been a columnist on various topics at ONJava, TheServerSide.com, openxource.com and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog.

He enjoys writing, and speaking at events such as JavaOne, Web 2.0 Expo, Future of Web Apps, Google I/O, JavaPolis, TheServerSide Symposium, and createdThe Ajax Experience . He also participates on the Java Community Process expert groups, and the open source community as a whole.

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.