

Show HN: Action.io - 0 to Rails in 60 seconds in your browser - iamclovin
https://www.action.io/

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xutopia
This is how Heroku got started and they quickly figured out that the editor in
the browser was an issue. No one liked it.

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iamclovin
The IDE is the first step. Our vision is to provide a set of tools so that
your runtime is on the cloud (but can be sync'ed offline) and you can use
whatever editor that you're most comfortable with.

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davedx
Is everything going to be done "like a boss" or only tailing log files?

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iamclovin
all the things

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drharris
Wow, I'm very impressed. There is definitely a killer app for this, and that
is Windows rails development. While it's better than it used to be, it's still
far from ideal, and time consuming to set up. Love the idea of being able to
use a consistent environment across multiple platforms. Great job; looking
forward to playing with this!

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3pt14159
Wow, I'm actually pretty sold.

One question though, is there delay when typing in the browser as there
normally is when you ssh into a box? That kinda drives me up the walls, and I
am an emacs person.

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raingrove
As long as you choose an availability zone that is closest to you when setting
up the box, the latency will be minimal. In our experience with using Vim on
our boxes, it was not a big problem. Emacs will run just as fine! (We aren't
taking sides, I used Emacs a lot when I was doing Scheme.)

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raarky
can you migrate boxes between zones?

in case you are travelling...

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iamclovin
Yup! Also on our todo list.

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Argorak
Hm. This is one of the rare times where a product actually does too much for
me. If it gave me the ability to build and manage virtual envs for testing and
development with ssh access (and maybe the ability to download them in say...
vagrant box format) and nothing more, I would be sold immediately.

With the glossy IDE finish: not my thing :/.

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iamclovin
You can completely do away with the IDE if you want and Vagrant integration is
in our todo list for sure.

P.S. Here's what Mitch (creator of Vagrant) has to say about action.io:
<https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/215491864080547840>

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Argorak
Saw the initial tweet, but I did not see the discussion. Vagrant integration
would be great, as I am traveling frequently and need my offline dev
environment.

Thanks for the info!

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freshlog
When I first saw the logo, I heard:

"Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"

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moe
This looks technically very interesting (how did you do the terminal
emulation, is that an OSS library?).

However I'm almost sure I don't want my Vim and terminals in the browser,
there surely will be all sorts of quirks with copy/paste etc.

Can the remote filesystem be mounted so that we can just hack with our local
terminals and editors?

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fishtoaster
If you're doing things on your local machine anyway, is there that much
benefit over just using heroku?

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JeanMertz
I guess full control over the VM stack is a big plus compared to Heroku

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vasco
Looks really good, I hope the rails beta goes smoothly because I would really
love to have this for Django. Loved the demo!

PS. Why not: on console focus-loss -> file browser auto refresh

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raingrove
Good idea! We are adding that to our to-do list right now!

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vertis
At the risk of being negative, I'm really sick of Show HN entries that go to a
page where you can signup to a 'early access' mailing list but not actually
get into the product and use it.

What exactly do you have to show besides the marketing?

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dko
This looks extremely promising. Setting up and maintaining consistent dev
environments are a time suck for any company. Companies like Quora are already
doing this internally on EC2 ([http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-
start-work-at-Qu...](http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-
at-Quora)).

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benbjohnson
The technology looks awesome but is this a pain point for people? I like
developing on my local machine. Setting up an environment can be a pain but I
only have to do it once. After that I forget about it.

Also, it worries me to depend on a third party service and my Internet
connection to get work done.

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ajhit406
The initial version of the platform will be really helpful to beginners,
designers, and anyone who's a bit allergic to the command line.

We're working on some great collaboration features and sandboxing that will
definitely make it useful for power users. We've also got a solution that
we're working on that will allow offline development so you can use native
editors and can work offline. Stay tuned.

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donny
This looks awesome. Congrats. Just wondering, why do you pick browser as the
IDE? (as a background, I've been developing iPad IDE called Worqshop).

It's an honest question. How does the IDE perform using the iPad Safari? I
thought about doing web-based IDE but found the performance very slow in my
testing. Ultimately, it boils down to native vs web apps.

Nevertheless, kudos to you. I know that doing front-end web UI, dealing with
AWS, and provisioning the boxes, are not trivial problems.

Edit: Just to preempt, yes, I know my app restricts developers to use iPad :)

Ups... reading the comments below... you will be providing SSH access to the
VMs

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jpastika
I really like what you have done. Having transitioned from a Windows/Visual
Studio .NET application development environment to an OS X and Rails
development environment within the last year, this would have been very
useful.

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duncan_bayne
For those saying this isn't solving a serious problem: my colleagues and I
have just spent weeks trying to get a reliable recipe for a Vagrant dev
environment that encompasses our interesting (and in some cases a bit old)
Rails-based tech. stack.

If we were starting again from scratch, we'd pretty much all agree to
outsource most stuff: use Heroku, GitHub, etc. And there are several people
intersted in Action.io now too.

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wakaflaka
This could be a really awesome pair programming tool if you could have real
time collaboration ala Google Docs.

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nicholassmith
It looks really interesting, but one of the things I like about standard Rails
dev work is I can work offline fairly easily. Mostly this a weird 'I have a
really long commute' thing, so I will be keeping an eye on this.

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ajhit406
Yeah-- we're working on a solution for this, so stay tuned. We're thinking
that dev ops drudge work is going to go the way of sys admin (thanks to
heroku).

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mangler
60 seconds?! It took me at least 10 seconds of looking for a 60-second thing
to work out that the shortest one of the things you can see that has some
meaning is almost five minutes long. Am I missing something??

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mark_l_watson
I just filled out a survey they emailed me and the thing I indicated as being
most important was an online development system to support remote pair
programming using tech like Apache Wave or Etherpad.

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munchor
I really like what you've done. Personally, not for me, I prefer programming
locally using emacs, but I think it'll be great for lots of people, it also
looks good, nice design :)

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nanijoe
I'll be sold when they give me access :) Seriously though, I have an old
Laptop that I still keep around mainly because rails is "set up right" for
some of my older projects

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weslly
It looks nice, btw I thought it was something from
<http://iphone.appstorm.net/>, the icon/favicon is almost the same.

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lucas3677
Interesting idea. If this takes off, I feel like it'll end up in every
developer's toolbox. Nicely done guys, looking forward to seeing the product!

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LaSombra
Maybe that will give Cloud9 a run for its money.

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oz
>Run specs, change database configurations and tail logs like a boss...

That little tidbit made my day!

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northisup
It isn't 60 seconds if I have to wait two weeks for an invite code...

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username3
email with a plus sign: "There was an error creating your invite, try again."

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iamclovin
Fixed, thanks!

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endlessvoid94
remote pairing with a graphical editor?

yes please.

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tbatterii
the video is over 4 minutes..... just saying.

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dinhhai
action.io - awesome product !!

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heretohelp
Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference
in mindset.

Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial?

I mean, the other end of the spectrum is to be focused purely on the obscure
and utterly advanced, like category theorists trying to harness Haskell.

I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to
let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they
advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. (The middle of
the proverbial road)

Meanwhile, we've got Rails (and I mean this separately of Ruby. The non-Rails
Ruby community is much more like the rest of us) at one end of the spectrum,
and Haskell/Clean/etc. at the other.

What the hell?

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localhost3000
'...web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness...' says it all
right there, doesn't it? You know what makes me a happy programmer? Building
things, not mucking about with setting up a new dev environment (and filling
my machine with crap) every time I hop on a new client project. Make the
'trivial' shit go away so I can focus on the
fun/interesting/creative/productive stuff...sounds good to me. I'm very
interested in a product like this where I can configure on the fly and keep my
machine uncluttered. (seriously, it just feels gross to have 6 different
versions of rails and 4 different rubies installed on my machine, even if RVM
makes it kinda easy)

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johnbender
Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of
swapping environments between projects.

<http://vagrantup.com>

I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible
collaboration.

