Recently I’ve been experimenting with online coding tools, wonderfl and Bespin. Essentially both are IDE’s enabling you to write code with syntax highlighting. Wonderfl enables coding for the Flash environment, while Bespin works in the HTML/JavaScript spectrum. There’s some pretty immediate differences, Bespin is an attempt at building an environment entirely in Canvas and wonderfl has the ability to generate the Flash piece on the fly.

Where things start getting interesting is when you start to be able to share the code with other developers. This is a more complete feature within wonderfl so for the next little bit I’ll concentrate on its model. This looks like a feature that will come with Bespin, allowing contributors to participate in Open Source initiatives.

Wonderfl allows the audience to browse other publicly available projects (does a private mode exist?). If they like the code they are free to fork the code and develop it in their own user environment. The owner of the original code is then notified that their code has been forked and is free to observe the changes. Its a smart introduction of social sharing that has always existed in the coding environment, but never to this level of slickness.

Today the guys over at the Arduino Blog posted this interesting hack enabling Bespin to enable syntax highlighting for Arduino code. Check out the comments, Olle Jonsson has developed a python script that allows you to compile (though still in the initial stages) Arduino code. Wonderfl has already produced some fantastic applications, and Bespin appears to be just getting started. There’s something significant brewing here, coding in the cloud appears to be something to watch very closely over the next couple of years.