Why Bespin Will Change Everything

Mozilla recently announced an excited new project called Bespin, an open-source extensible web-based framework that pushes code editing in the cloud. At first glance, it's like Eclipse that runs in your browser, however there is a hidden potential in Bespin, that I believe, will change everything.

Let's take a step back and examine how Google Docs has changed the business world. Prior to GDocs, Microsoft Office (and it's expensive price tag) was the norm. Collaborating on documents usually meant emailing a Word file and waiting for the reply. GDocs not only made real-time collaboration possibly, it also made it easy. Documents no longer lived on your desktop, but rather were accessible from anywhere via the internet. You could just as easily edit and collaborate on a document from a public terminal in a London coffee shop, as you could from your office.

Fast forward to Bespin, which brings the same benefits as GDocs to the developers world. Before Bespin, it was incredibly difficult for a developer to work without their own computer. Hardware specifications and environment settings are no longer important, because now with Bespin you could just as easily develop from a public terminal. Second, even with version control, video conferencing and instant messaging, pair programming was still painful when done remotely. Bespin not only makes real-time collaboration possible, and also makes it easy.

Great, Bespin eliminates the need for expensive hardware, software licenses and makes collaboration a snap, but what's the real impact?

Let's go one step further, and combine Bespin with Google's powerful yet under-utilized translation api. Imagine, two developers collaborating in real-time to create the next big web app. Now imagine our two developers, each working from public computers, one at a coffee shop, and the other a library. Now imagine these developers living in different continents, each speaking a different language, perhaps one Swahili, and the other French. Now imagine an integrated IM sidebar to Bespin which auto translates their dialog similar to GTalk language bots. Now imagine the code comments, being auto translated to every possible language, so the next developer speaking a different language could quickly understand and collaborate on the project. Now multiple the number of developers by 1000, all collaborating in real-time on same open source project, potentially speaking dozens of different dialects. When you combine Bespin and the power of cloud developing with something as simple as translation api, the possibilities are endless.

Imagine the potential usage for a nonprofit like Geekcorp, who already have incredible success stories of connecting technical experts to communities in developing countries.

Or the potential integration with Ken Bank's Mobility Project which "brings together some of the leading academics, technicians, educators and practitioners in the IT and mobile fields with the common goal of developing an exciting and empowering range of tools and resources to unlock the power of mobile applications development for users in the developing world"

Multilingual collaborative cloud developing could play a huge role in the bare-foot college innovative to transfer software development skills, reducing development costs, bridging language barriers and providing real-time collaboration. And with the recent success of netbooks in developing countries, Bespin has the potential to change everything.

Thanks to Kaushal Jhalla for inspiring me and sharing these ideas.