Working on Bespin Bugs

I'll be working on Bespin for Mozilla and have requested to be assigned a few bugs I found on Bugzilla. I have requested to contribute to issue 516852, about how the scrollbar cursor doesn't change to the correct cursor when it's over the custom scrollbars in the editor, and issue 521823 about how commented code doesn't display as being 'greyed-out' when the cursor is near the bottom of the file, but becomes greyed out once you move the cursor to the top of the comment block. I chose to work on these two issues because I thought it would give me an introduction to the Bespin code, give me some access to the code, and begin my understanding of the inner-workings of Bespin. Unfortunately, I was denied working on issue 521823, due to the fact that 'it's unclear to me(Kevin Dangoor) when we will bring the debugging functionality back. There are significantly more important things on our plate than that...'. That is unfortunate because I was looking forward to working on it a lot, but that will have to wait.



Background

Bespin is an online IDE developed by Mozilla Labs. It allows users to create and edit code, similar to Microsoft Visual Studio, from within a web-browser with no client-side installation necessary. It allows multiple users to work on and discuss a single piece of code/program collaboratively. It is also a piece of open-source software...a very attractive option to developers everywhere.



Progress Tracking

I will be tracking this progress on my wiki. I will also post things that other developers would find important on the issue page (516852). They will be able to follow me through my wiki and through my posts on the issue pages listed above. I expect to have looked at the code for these issues by February 5th and to have issue 516852 finished by February 19th. It does not seem to be a very big issue so I do not expect it to take long to resolve.

Different Versions of Each Release

As stated previously, the issue does not seem very large so I do not expect it to take very long. For issue 516852, I plan on it being done for February 19th. I will then continue to work on more bugs to help out the mozilla community. I will discuss my issues with Kevin Dangoor to ensure I am doing everything according to specs.

Overall

I will have to brush up on my JavaScript since that is what Bespin appears to be coded in, in order to complete the bugs I wish to work on.. I have contacted Kevin Dangoor and there is another programmer, Alex. Google will be my best friend when it comes to this assignment, and I plan on using it through every step of the way. I am sure to experience new barriers as time progresses and I hit little annoying bugs that take far too long to fix. I expect to talk to people over irc and learn on my own using google to overcome the barriers, and I expect it to work well. We shall see how it works in the end. It is my first experience working with open source and contributing to a project such as this, so I expect it to be a great learning experience and don't doubt that it will teach me much in terms of contributing to development in the 'real world' and helping me to understand what it's like to contribute my skills outside of corporations (such as RBC, where I did my co-op) and school.