
Web-based IDEs to become mainstream? - nreece
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/web-based-ide
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jimrandomh
I can see this being useful for introductory programming classes, but not for
real projects. For a real programming project, there are a lot of things you
need which are very hard to implement in a browser: a debugger, profiler,
version control, and code completion, to start. And then there's the whole
issue of the host running people's arbitrary in-development code on their
server, which may accidentally spin into an infinite loop, or deliberately
send spam, exploit local root exploits on the host system and so on.

The browser is good for many things, but it is not and will not ever be a good
IDE.

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ShabbyDoo
A great place to start with these IDEs would be programming courses in the
learn-to-think-algorithmically genre -- those often taken by non-majors. The
overhead, in terms of both set-up time and learning difficulty, is a
significant burden for a single semester course and often detracts from more
meaningful learning.

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rayvega
Phone interviews were you ask someone to write some code to demonstrate their
skills would benefit tremendously from web-based IDE. Makes it easier to
filter out not-so-great applicants earlier in the process. Might give you a
better idea to whether or not a candidate is worth bringing in for a face-to-
face interview.

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releasedatez
Great idea! That means I'm not tied to one computer and I get to use the same
IDE everywhere with my personal settings. One thing that bugs me the most is
when I have to copy my custom settings over to other computers. I think web-
based IDE will solve that problem.

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jaaron
for several IDEs the settings can be exported or are even stored in a file
that can be synched via subversion or some other revision control. I keep all
of my emacs customization files in subversion and can quickly replicate my
environment anywhere.

As for the suggestion that web IDEs are becoming mainstream, I say: far from
it. Most developers haven't even heard of bespin or similar projects.
Personally, I'd be surprised if they ever go mainstream.

~~~
catch23
Plus developers generally have pretty wonky setups that are crazy different
from each other. Ever tried doing paired programming at a small dev shop? I
couldn't type on anyone's keyboard, everyone had their own key mappings,
keyboard layouts, shortcuts etc. Some had shorthand hostnames in their
.ssh/config, non-standard terminal settings, crazy scripts in their .bashrc
files, different virtual machines for different environments, etc. I'd say it
would be impossible to convince a developer that this is the only IDE they
can/should use.

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vegai
No.

