TouchDevelop [Browser Client] is now Open Source (MIT) and on GitHub

Canadian Developer Connection - Microsoft Research makes Touch Develop open source

Touch Develop is a tool developed by Microsoft Research that allows developers to build mobile apps, games and websites in a browser. As of this week it is now open source on Git!

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s that introduced many of us to the power of programming. TouchDevelop brings that magic to modern touch-based devices. The result is a tool that you can use to write basic code using a browser and can play on websites or mobile devices

What is TouchDevelop? ...

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TouchDevelop has always been a very open tool, with developers having the ability to share their scripts with other Touch Develop users. But now they take the next step – they have released the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. You can fork it there, submit pull requests with bug-fixes or new features, submit and comment on issues in the bug-tracker, and check on latest activity. TouchDevelop consists of about 160,000 lines of TypeScript plus some CSS and a tiny bit of HTML. ...

TouchDevelop - TouchDevelop goes open-source

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s. This is how many in our team learned about programming and we wanted to bring that magic to modern touch-based devices. In very beginning, with our first Windows Phone 7 app, it was about programming your own device, 80s style.

Soon after, we have moved to the open web as the platform and added the capability to publish and share your programs (scripts) with other users in source form, so others can learn from and even improve upon them. We believe this openness has helped the platform quite a bit, with over 200,000 scripts published over the past 3 years.

Today, we’re taking another step on this path – we’re releasing the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

Join the party!

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. ...

What’s not there

You’ll notice we’re not releasing the source of our Windows Phone and Android apps, as they will become obsolete very soon, when we switch to Apache Cordova. Also, running a cloud back-end for a major service like TouchDevelop is costly and complicated. We’re thus not expecting you to do that (and we’re not releasing the back-end). Instead, you can run your forked version of the TouchDevelop client web app against our cloud services. This will work as long as you’re running the client on localhost. If you want to run it from a different domain, drop us an email and we can talk about it.

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Microsoft/TouchDevelop

TouchDevelop is a touch-friendly app creation environment for iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux developed with <3 at Microsoft Research. Our mobile-friendly editor makes coding fun, even on your phone or tablet!

This repo contains the source code of the TouchDevelop editor. If you are intending to write TouchDevelop scripts, you probably want to go to touchdevelop.com:

• stable: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app
• beta: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app/beta

Other pages of interest:

• landing page: https://www.touchdevelop.com
• blog: https://www.touchdevelop.com/blog
• Hour Of Code tutorials: https://www.touchdevelop.com/hoc

What's in this repo?

The repo is mostly written in Typescript with tiny pieces of HTML gluing.

This repo contains the source code for:

• the browser client
  • the compiler
  • the editor
  • the runtime
• the node.js client

However, you will not find the cloud backend code here. Indeed, https://www.touchdevelop.com takes care of storing and managing the scripts.

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute to TouchDevelop....

I tweeted this earlier, but wanted to follow-up with a normal blog post (and there's also going to be a Coding4Fun, http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog,  post on it next Wednesday too ;)