[follower]

While it's obviously early days, what I find most interesting about this is that it's (a) Adobe, (b) Open Source and (c) developing in the open.

Does anyone know more about how this came to be/what the plans are for the future?

[adrocknaphobia]

The history of the project is quite simple. We wanted to see if it was possible to build a high quality code editor for web development in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The idea being two fold. The engineers working on Brackets would experience the day-to-day development pains of building for the web so they would be in a better position to innovate new solutions. The other benefit is that most open source tools are out of the reach of their target audiences. If you have the skills to use Brackets, you have the skills to build Brackets.

Our original prototype ran completely in the browser using node.js for file i/o. So why did we take it out of the browser and focus on the desktop first? While we believe the future of development is heading towards the cloud, we found that many people are still looking for traditional desktop tools. By starting on he desktop and then supplementing with a cloud-based version, we hope to help transition developers to this new model, without asking them to give up what know and love.

Of course, it's not just about the cloud. Because we're developing on the open web platform, we can go wherever that platforms goes. While it's not our immediate focus we hope to build a version of Brackets optimized for tablets as well as an embedded version that could run inside existing web application.

Adobe has committed some of its best engineering talent to the project for the foreseeable future. If you check the activity on the repo, you'll see it's not a part-time side project. We have a long way to go before we would declare 1.0, but we think we can get there for the desktop version within the year.

I invite everyone to join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/brackets-dev) or pop in to Freenode IRC channel #brackets to chat w/ the development team.

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Adam Lehman Brackets Product Manager

[follower]

Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful reply. :)

[benologist]

Adobe does lots of open source.... most of Flash is.

[AndreCharland]

Well there's also PhoneGap (Apache Cordova), jQuery we contribute too and as well as Webkit now. On the enterprise side CQ/Day is built off Apache Jackrabbit which Adobe engineers contribute.