ActiveState announces Open Komodo Project

VANCOUVER, B.C: Provider of professional development tools, ActiveState Software Inc. has announced the creation of the Open Komodo Project, a new initiative to create an open source platform that promotes open standards.

The Open Komodo Project will fill a need for developer tools in the open web technology stack, furthering web innovation and freedom of choice for developers and end-users.

With the creation of the Open Komodo Project, ActiveState is joining advocates like Mozilla in promoting the open web. The open web philosophy aims to maintain the integrity of the web as a public space that is platform, language, and browser neutral. Open web standards advocate user freedom and choice, encourage decentralization and community, and ensure the viability of non-proprietary web technologies.

Open Komodo aims to create a framework for client-side web development integrated with Firefox, Mozilla’s free, open source web browser, and based on the Komodo IDE, a multi-platform, multi-language IDE for dynamic languages and Ajax technologies.

As a first step in the Open Komodo project, ActiveState is open sourcing the browser-side capabilities of Komodo Edit, a free multi-language editor for dynamic languages based on Komodo IDE.

“ActiveState has long lived by a philosophy of developer choice. We focus on dynamic languages, but give developers the freedom to choose what tools they use in their development process,” said Shane Caraveo, Komodo Lead at ActiveState.

He added, “The open web philosophy is an extension of our involvement in the open source community as supporters and contributors. As strong advocates for the open web initiative, it’s essential for us to enable developers to contribute to the open web.”

“The Open Komodo project is an exciting alternative for web developers seeking an open source development environment,” said Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist at Mozilla. “At Mozilla, we believe that open standards encourage innovation and help ensure the continued health of the Internet. We’re pleased that ActiveState is supporting the open web.”

The initial open source code for Open Komodo will be a portion of ActiveState's Komodo Edit, which will form the base for the full-featured web development tool built in collaboration with the open source community. Open Komodo will use the Mozilla code base and feature a Scintilla-based editor for HTML, CSS, XML, and JavaScript. The planned feature set includes JavaScript debugging, autocomplete, syntax coloring, and syntax checking capabilities, as well as Firebug integration and an HTTP Inspector with the goal of providing seamless debugging and editing between Open Komodo and Firefox.

The Open Komodo development environment will be entirely open source and licensed under the same terms as Firefox: Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL).