

Developers: a new kind of IDE arrives in Cloud9 (First look) - jaffoneh
http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/10/developers-a-new-kind-of-ide-arrives-in-cloud9/

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latch
Having an IDE as a "service" is a pretty big leap for me. Paying a monthly fee
for this is beyond my current ability to fathom.

For $22/month I can get 10 users on a private github - the 2 ios devs can use
xcode, the 3 rails guys can use textmate, etc..

When you compare this against the more "corporate" stuff - VS or IntelliJ,
well...most large corporations aren't ready to store source outside of their
firewall, and they have volume licensing anyways.

Eh, but I'm generally wrong about this sorta thing anyways...

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soulclap
I actually started using it today, maybe two hours before it got posted on
Scobleizer and while I didn't experience any super-fancy code assist features,
it is fast, responsive and does not get in the way. Fell in love right away
and I am basically not a fan of hosted coding environments like this but as my
code is pretty much standalone JS for now it seemed to make perfect sense.

Basically I only went there because I had it bookmarked a few days ago and
Aptana crashed my box when I tried to create a new file (yeah, I know, that
was a wild idea). But now I am kind of glad I did.

Too bad it's down right now but if you can't get through and haven't seen it
yet, give it a shot some time later.

~~~
gexla
Aptana crashed my box...

That's why I don't use IDE's. ;)

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soulclap
Because bugs are restricted to IDEs?

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duck
It appears <http://cloud9ide.com/> is down and thus the problem with this
solution.

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javruben
We're back up. A combination of reaching maturity and offline support will
make this a problem of the past.

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gexla
How would I use it? I wouldn't. I have my editor in the cloud. I log into my
remote server via a terminal and I fire up Vim. ;) There are plenty of people
who have tried the editor in the cloud thing, nobody seems to have been able
to build anything which has stuck. Meanwhile, Vim and Emacs are still going
strong and perhaps the best editors available. It would be tough to create
something which could provide an alternative to something so versatile and has
had years of community add-ons and improvements being made.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I think you're right about the versatility aspects. If a cloud editor is going
to grow I think it's going to come out of somewhere like Heroku. Where it
exists in one "opinionated" niche and can be customized specifically to work
with that environment.

~~~
gexla
Interesting you mention Heroku as they first started out with a Rails editor.
That seemed to be one of their big features aside from hosting Rails
applications.

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Udo
I followed the roots of this with interest, back when it was called Bespin,
then SkyWriter. The idea is compelling: most web developers just need a
highlighting-capable text editor with online connectivity. Many of us work
directly on staging servers, so in theory if there was a capable web-based
editor around, you could work from pretty much any computer without having to
install something. You could log into your web-based editor and all your
bookmarks, SSH certs, everything would be there.

Now, Cloud9 is - from what I understand - the commercial version of this
concept. Right now, signup seems to be broken, but I'm curious how it turned
out.

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javruben
Sign-up is back up, the entire site was down for a moment. We're improving
monitoring systems to deal with this better in the future.

~~~
Udo
Great, thanks! I just signed up and tried it out. You guys did an awesome job!
The gitHub checkout was flawless and the editor is really nice.

There is, however, one "problem" that prevents me from switching to c9 and
trying it out for a few days: as far as I can tell c9 allows us to edit files
on your server and then push the updated project back into the git repository.
For a web dev like me this would mean a commit after _every_ edit and then I'd
have to manually pull the changes from GitHub onto my dev server _every single
time_.

I don't know if I'm the exception here, but I pretty much need my editor to
save files directly onto my server (preferably via SFTP). The git integration
thing is still great, it's just not compatible with my workflow to do a commit
and manual pull for every edit. I don't spend hours making changes and then
test them all at once - instead I make small changes, save, and then run tests
immediately.

~~~
rikarends
Yep, SSH/SFTP integration is currently number 1 on the list, stay tuned!

~~~
Udo
Cool, keep up the great work! :-)

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SoftwareMaven
Having worked at what was probably the first company to build an IDE in the
browser (Bungee Labs) that subsequently crashed and burned, I wish them luck
with it. I think you can be successful, but you have to VERY carefully target
your customers (and if you think "every" developer is interested, you might as
well hand the investors their money back and go home now).

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smhinsey
I believe this is based on what used to be called Mozilla Bespin. Interesting
project to be sure. I'm skeptical overall though.

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joshu
I watched for a few seconds, then jumped a few seconds later, and then closed
the window.

A few reactions:

\- show me, not tell me. lots of blah blah

\- i still hate "building 43" as a name. it's a strange reference to a part of
another company; is rackspace SO limp that they have no corporate culture
whatsoever?

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51Cards
I would be very wary. You are trusting the "cloud" even for access to work on
your code let alone store and secure it. I just don't think it's there yet.
Maybe I'm just old school but I like having a copy of my code where I know
it's safe and secure and where I can get to it on a moments notice if needed.

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famousactress
I really like these ideas, and I'd love to see one of them go. I did notice
the demo url was 127.0.0.1 though... I know, it's just a demo..

That said, one question.. Do you guys work 100% in your own IDE? And hosted
(not localhost)? I think that's a must if you want other shops to use it.

Also I think a zero-barrier demo on your site would be huge. I ought to be
able to click a link, land in an editor, and write some running code, a-la the
mongodb shell on their site.

~~~
rikarends
I had to demo Cloud9 on local URL since i didn't have internet there, that
made debugging an online process a bit hard. We wil have a much more capable
offline version of Cloud9 with online/offline mode soon. Our entire team is
developing and debugging Cloud9 within Cloud9. Its a great way to stabilize.
We dont really have database support yet in our cloud version, so only the
devs that do the UI / DB-less backend work do that on the hosted version right
now. This should become 100% hosted pretty soon.

~~~
famousactress
Thanks for filling in the details :)

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futuremint
Hmm... now maybe I can use my Cr48 for something...

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TheAlan
This seems awesome! Is there a way to connect this to a server via SSH or
something? So that you can work on your development server from everywhere.

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rikarends
We have a short-list of features we are adding first besides stabilization,
SFTP/SSH support is pretty much number 1.

