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What lies ahead for Nvu

Nvu has been one of my favorite open source web editors since its 1.0 release in 2005.

For those who have never used Nvu. Nvu is a mature cross-platform web editor which features WYSIWYG editing of pages, integrated file management via FTP, reliable HTML generation, powerful support for forms, tables, and templates and so much more.

However its been more than a year since no new version has been released, so there had been speculation that the project had been canceled by Daniel Glazman, its main developer. Last Monday I caught up with him in an IRC session, and I want to share some stuff that he discussed.

Unfortunately, its official now! Nvu is dead! According to Daniel Glazman he discontinued the project because of inherent weaknesses in the engine it was based on, that is Mozilla Gecko 1.7. The engine was limiting the development team's ability to add new and innovative features like support for XULrunner. So a decision was made to dump the project and go for a from-scratch rewrite, currently the project is being called "Composer", not to be confused with Mozilla Composer . There are speculations about the name of the new Composer when asked if he was naming it after a furry animal, he replied "no comment", and when asked why he didn't just name it Nvu 2.0, that according to Daniel was not possible as Nvu was still a trademark with Linspire. Linspire by the way is not involved with Daniel in the new project. However trademark issues dont end with Nvu "Composer" too, is a Mozilla trademark however they have extended support to the new composer project, in the form of trademark relaxation and allocating space in their CVS repository. The only sponsor this time around is Disruptive Innovations itself, Daniel Glazman's own company, all in all there are currently four developers in the team.

So what features can we expect from the new Composer! When asked if he targeted feature compatibility to MS Frontpage and Dreamweaver, the de-facto website editors in Microsoft Windows, Glazman replied by saying "Frontpage is dead" and that he would love to be feature compatible with Dreamweaver. Website editors are an essential component in web development and open source website editors have always lagged their proprietary rivals, the new effort I hope will reduce the gap.

The new Composer will be standards compliant, when Daniel was asked if he would implement non-standard features if his views diverged W3C HTML working groups, his reply was that HTML 4 was the standard and that there will be no successors for any time soon. The new Composer will have everything one can expect from a decent website editor with lots of lots of innovations, initial releases will target XHTML/HTML 4 compatibility. Stylesheet management like in Dreamweaver, will be included in the new Composer.

When asked if he targeted professional developers or beginners, he replied that he was targeting both, creating a GUI for beginners and have all sorts of advanced functionality and APIs for professional developers. Daniel focuses on providing 'cool' and powerful templates for beginners. Although Windows website editors have had templates for years, in the Open Source world templates where introduced by Nvu, and they will be a vital part in the new Composer.

So when can we expect the first version of the new Composer? According to Daniel Glazman he expects to release version 0.1 in the first days of December! As for Nvu, it is not to be written off just yet! There has been a fork of the codebase, KompoZer, which aims at moving the project forward and eliminating bugs.

I would like to know from web-developers reading this, which web editor do they rate highest, and why?