Today ActiveState announced the Open Komodo Project, an initiative to create an open source platform for building developer environments. The project overview has lots of information on the details. Here is a good summary:
Open Komodo is not a product, but rather a code base upon which Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software packages can be developed. ActiveState’s Komodo Edit (free but not open source multi-platform, multi-language editor) and Komodo IDE (multi-platform, multi-language IDE for dynamic languages and Ajax technologies IDE) are existing, mature products that will use the Open Komodo platform.
In addition to the code base, the project will also start building a web development tool called SnapDragon:
The Open Komodo Project aims to create a full-featured web development tool for client-side web development integrated with Firefox©, Mozilla’s free, open source web browser, and based on the award-winning Komodo IDE. This new tool, codenamed Komodo Snapdragon, will be developed in collaboration with the open source community.
The project timeline gives information on how the project is expected to unfold. There seem to be many ways developers can participate in the project, including just lurking on the mailing list.
This project will provide some great open source code to the Mozilla platform for development tools. This is an area that many Mozilla developers feel is lacking and has been a much talked about issue for the new MozPad group as well. I look forward to a strong community forming around the project and using the code base to create many great developer tools.
Thanks ActiveState!
This is great news. I’ve tried Komodo before, and while I am still using vim, it is still a really neat editor and debugger. It is also a great example of (may I say, hard to believe) applications built upon the Mozilla Platform.
Building an IDE on the Mozilla platform seems to be a really good idea. We can expect deep integration of firbug and maybe other debugging tools for server-side logic. The 3 open licenses are also a very good thing.
On the other hand we can see that Komodo IDE will still be available and, of course, not free. I wonder if ActivState wouldn’t be tempted to limit functionnalities of the free version… At least I assume that they will manage to keep the free version always a step under…
Moreover, there is already a functionnal and promising open source, multi-platfrom, multi-languages web oriented IDE : Aptana, build on Eclipse…
“May the best IDE win” ?