Bespin in Titanium: From The Jaws Of Victory...

bespin is really an intriguing project. Since I’ve grown frustrated with the inconsistencies between the various code editors that I have been using – I work on Leopard at home and Ubuntu at work – I thought that creating my own editor would be the answer to that. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just something consistent.

My first impulse was to use Flex. And it almost worked! Using mx:html I was able to wrap a nice web page in an otherwise very ActionScript-y application.
And then, catastrophe! Flex Webkit’s canvas implementation is subpar and I could only get a very mamed version of bespin. Nothing usable, anyway.

Thus, I turned to Titanium.
After some light trial and error, I got it to work!

Unfortunately, the result is less than awesome: Titanium’s Webkit gets easily overwhelmed and, worse, crashes reliably ( :g: ) as soon as I ask it to do some medium lifting.

This video shows the original victory followed by the vexing defeat:

Note that, to get it to work, I replaced embed.js with my own version that works around any dojo.request()/eval issue:

(function() {  
    // -- Load Script  
    var loadme = new Array();  
    var loadScript = function(src, onload) {  
        var embedscript = document.createElement("script");  
        embedscript.type = "text/javascript";  
        embedscript.src = src;  
        embedscript.onload = onload;  
        document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(embedscript);  
    }  
    var onScriptLoaded = function() {  
        var src = loadme.shift();  
        if(src)  
            loadScript(src, onScriptLoaded);  
    }  
        
    var componentRequires = function() {  
        dojo.require("bespin.bespin");  
            
        dojo.require("bespin.util.canvas");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.keys");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.navigate");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.path");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.tokenobject");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.util");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.mousewheelevent");  
        dojo.require("bespin.util.urlbar");  
            
        dojo.require("bespin.client.filesystem");  
        dojo.require("bespin.client.settings");  
        dojo.require("bespin.client.status");  
        dojo.require("bespin.client.server");  
        dojo.require("bespin.client.session");  
            
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.actions");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.clipboard");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.cursor");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.editor");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.events");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.model");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.toolbar");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.themes");  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.undo");  
            
        dojo.require("bespin.syntax.base");   
        dojo.require("bespin.syntax.simple._base");  
            
        dojo.require("bespin.cmd.commandline");  
        dojo.require("bespin.cmd.commands");  
        dojo.require("bespin.cmd.editorcommands");  
            
        dojo.require("th.helpers"); // -- Thunderhead... hooooo  
        dojo.require("th.css");  
        dojo.require("th.th");  
        dojo.require("th.models");  
        dojo.require("th.borders");  
        dojo.require("th.components");        
    }  
        
    loadScript("js/dojo/dojo.js.uncompressed.js", function() {  
        dojo.require = function(src) {            
            loadme.push('js/' + src.replace(/\./g, '/') + '.js');  
        }  
        componentRequires();  
        dojo.require("bespin.editor.component");  
        loadScript(loadme.shift(), onScriptLoaded);  
    });  
})();

As you can see, I override dojo.request() with my own, stack up all the component names, then load them one by one, waiting for each to be fully loaded before moving on.