So it's been a month since we released Cloud9 IDE on JsConf.eu and it's been crazy ever since. While working on the project in the past months, the enthusiasm for the project within our team grew. The response we´ve received after our presentation has been overwhelming and has really been a confirmation for us that we´re on the right track.

We are happy to announce (as Dion Almaer already gave away) that Ajax.org’s Cloud9 team and Mozilla’s Skywriter team have decided to collaborate on bringing coding to the Cloud.

At JsConf we got acquainted to the Mozilla Skywriter team. We spoke with Kevin Dangoor, Joe Walker and Patrick Walton to see if there was a common ground. As it turns out we have a similar approach to a lot of parts of our projects. We feel that both our projects can take advantage from a partnership. Mozilla has been doing great work on Bespin/Skywriter and it just seemed silly to them and to us to not work together on making the best Cloud editor in the world.

A few months back Kevin Dangoor posted a roadmap for a NodeJS based server to the Skywriter development team. Since then the Skywriter development team has been given a much broader scope: web developer tools for Firefox and Mozilla as a whole. To quote Kevin:

[Mozilla] certainly still cares about Skywriter and sees it as important to the future of Firefox developer tools, our time however, is split in many directions now. As far as Firefox devtools go, the customizable editor component is all that really matters. The planned desktop and server environments are very cool, but not absolute needs.”

When we created the ACE Editor our goal was to build a web based IDE that we would want to use ourselves. The work on the Cloud9 IDE has already progressed to the point where we are developing Cloud9 in Cloud9 itself and actually like it. The project is fully open source and the server environment is in place. A desktop version is on the roadmap and we’re looking at Mozilla’s Chromeless as a possible way to achieve this.

Cloud9 is built with the same RequireJS modularization as Skywriter uses and is very easily extendable. It currently does NodeJS debugging quite well and we are also working on a Chrome debugger connector and hopefully Firefox soon too.

We believe everybody will win if we together with Mozilla and the Skywriter community can create a shared infrastructure and eco-system of syntax highlighters, keybinding maps, renderers and formatting tools. We are confident that our development effort of these components will be a great addition to both the Cloud9 and Skywriter community.

We're looking at a plan where we come together on a number of parts of the project, in this rough order:

• Plugin system
• Settings
• Syntax highlighters
• Commands
• Themes

As a first step we have opened up a shared code repository on Github. Code hosted in this repository are licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

We see a bright future for web based tooling, especially with the ever increasing speed of the browsers and the advent of server side JavaScript. We believe the cooperation between Mozilla and Ajax.org will accelerate the availability of great developer tooling for and on the web, and can help bring the open web to the next level.