

CoderBuddy, Napster investor's free Web IDE for Python & sites on App Engine - adrianscott
http://www.coderbuddy.com/go/testinghn

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adrianscott
Hi, we wanted to invite a few of you into our private beta. This is still an
early version of our product, but hopefully there's enough functionality that
some will find useful.

CoderBuddy is free for commercial, non-commercial and open source projects.

There were a few posts on HN about having a web-based way to use Google App
Engine for static sites, and that's one thing you can do with CoderBuddy.

You can build and publish web-based applications in Python on Google App
Engine. CoderBuddy comes with an instantly updating test environment and
integrated publishing to App Engine. we're starting to roll out a more
advanced editor, the 'New Editor (beta)' link with tabs.

We invite your suggestions of who we should test this out with, and your top 3
feature requests. We've tried to make it really easy for someone to get
started coding and publishing. We'd also love to hear from folks giving
workshops soon who might want to try this out there.

Thanks, -Adrian (Napster founding investor, founder of social networking
pioneer Ryze)

~~~
mrspandex
I was contemplating writing a site for appengine/python so I immediately
jumped at trying this out. My biggest concern was that I wanted to be able to
download the code when I was done, so I was glad to see it was an option to do
just that. My ideal would be making that a git repository I could push or pull
from. I also tried to use the site in Opera. I understand it's probably not
common, but both editors seem to be broken. I think it would be a really good
idea for this IDE to optionally integrate with webapp and hide away some of
the framework-specific boilerplate behind slick interfaces.

~~~
adrianscott
Hi, thanks for the suggestion re interfaces and such, that sounds cool.

I've been able to reproduce problems with the new editor in my copy of Opera,
but our classic editor is working fine for me. We'll investigate this more and
see what we can do -- thanks for reporting it!

And yeah, we'd like to add more git support over time! ;)

Thanks,

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trotsky
I look at: <https://coderbuddy1.appspot.com/legal/tos>

and it immediately makes me concerned that anything written in the service
that was later deemed exceptionally valuable would get lawyer locked.

I don't have the same concerns with gcc, eclipse, visual studio.

I don't see anything that's there to assuage my fears? I'm not saying that's
what's going on in the least, but it's a reasonable fear, no? Or am I off
base?

 _Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give
CoderBuddy a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce,
adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and
distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling CoderBuddy to
provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy._

Some lawyer really went over that, you make me feel like I need one too.

~~~
kbutler
> for the sole purpose of enabling CoderBuddy to provide you with the Service

IANAL, but that's a pretty strong qualifier: "the sole purpose" basically says
they can only use your app for, well, the sole purpose of providing you with
the service.

------
mentat
I didn't realize how much having an editor in the web browser would make
playing with this sort of development more seamless. I'd experimented with GAE
before but I usually code in vim so switching from terminal to browser to
terminal broke up the flow of trying stuff out. I'm not sure how viable this
is for large application development, but I think if you put some tutorials in
(perhaps like Ruby Koans), it would be an amazing learning tool.

~~~
adrianscott
Thanks, we'd like to build towards support for a good range of tutorials and
other educational and performance-building/enhancing interactions. It may take
a bit of time to build it out towards supporting large application development
well, but we hope to get there over time!

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rmason
I think CodeBuddy is a good, not great idea. But the implmentation is poor.
Unless I need a quick guestbook application ;<).

It's not in Python, but if you want to see a well done off line version of the
same thing checkout <http://alan.blog-city.com/openbd_desktop.htm>

It's an Eclipse based desktop app that makes publishing to the GAE pretty
simple. IF CFML isn't your cup of tea there's no reason why you couldn't
implement a fork for any other language.

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beaker
This looks promising. I found a small issue off the bat - when I created a new
guestbook app and then previewed it, I received the following error:

TemplateSyntaxError at /

Caught TemplateDoesNotExist while rendering: base.html

I went back and edited the 'base.html', hit save, and this fixed the problem.
Thanks for the preview and good luck!

~~~
adrianscott
Thanks for passing this on, we'll look into it!

------
beaker
Is there a way to create new directories inside of a project? My apologies if
I missed it, but I couldn't find one. A nice feature would be the ability to
upload a zip file and have it unzipped on the server side with all the files
added automatically to the project (rather than having to upload each file
individually).

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peteysd
I think that a tool like this would be really great for students learning how
to program. It allows them to experiment without the sometimes daunting task
of having to set up a development environment.

I can definitely envision an application like this being used in the
classroom.

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vladd
Looks interesting, we've created a similar free Web IDE for server-side
JavaScript - <http://www.erbix.com/js/> . We'd love if you take it for a spin
and give us any feedback you might have :)

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adelevie
An iPad-friendly layout would be interesting.

~~~
adrianscott
Thanks, we'll be working on that.

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js4all
I saw several online-IDEs, but none offloads hosting to Google. What a great
idea.

~~~
adrianscott
thanks!

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cantbecool
Didn't Heroku have something similar to this a few years ago?

~~~
adrianscott
Yes, they did have something somewhat like it. (Heroku Garden I think it was
called.)

------
Aloisius
Is it me or is founding investor of Napster an odd title?

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white_devil
"All your code are belong to us!". Somehow a web IDE doesn't seem to make much
sense.

------
tedjdziuba
I suspect that using this product will be a punishment for not knowing Emacs
or Vim.

