CodeMirror and Opensourcing

May 8, 2010

We knew at the onset of building the SkillTesting app that an in-browser source code editor with syntax highlighting and indentation was going to be critical so we went off and evaluated the various JavaScript code editors out there – EditArea, Bespin, CodeMirror, and others. There is actually a pretty good comparison matrix here and we ended up going with CodeMirror for a few different reasons – its development community seemed pretty active, it supported Python (our language of choice) and, most importantly, it is FAST!

One of the great things about CodeMirror is that its architecture supports the plugging in of different parsing rules so that you can write your own parser while the “plumbing” is all taken care of for you. We knew from the onset that C# and Java were not languages supported by CodeMirror so we knew we were going to have to write parsers ourselves (unless someone beat us to it) for them. Well…nobody did beat us to it and we built the C# parser and are working on others.

So…now we want to give back this parser to the community and are not real sure what the best way to do this is. We can submit the code to the CodeMirror guys and will do that, but I am toying with the idea of creating our own open source repository where we can add this and any other code that we give back to the community. I’m really interested in how other companies have gone about this. We’re just trying to establish SkillTesting as an open-source contributor and get a little recognition. I’d love other peoples’ thoughts on this.