

Create web apps in JavaScript right from your browser - yogsototh
http://akshell.com

======
nbashaw
Thank you _so much_ for making this. I'm learning to program, and an intern at
a place where I can't use my computer, can't install anything on their windows
machines, and have a lot of free time. You just made my life a LOT better.

~~~
Smerity
Sounds like you need to get a better internship =]

Mind you, if it pays well and you have enough spare time to pursue your own
interests then it might not be such a bad thing overall!

~~~
olegp
Maybe we should start paying you for building Akshell apps for our clients?
That way you can do what you enjoy and get paid for it, while getting your CV
points as well ;)

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cubicle67
You've no idea how good it is to see an IDE on an iPad. Editing doesn't seem
to work, but so what; it's _there_

~~~
olegp
We are aware of this and are working on an on screen keyboard, kind of like
this: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-
virtual-k...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual-
keyboards-in-google.html)

To answer the question below: we would need a custom layout to ensure all the
curly brackets and other common JS chars are one tap away

~~~
Flow
Why not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?

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mileszs
It looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not
trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to
do so.

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Flow
Alright, but shouldn't the solution be to allow the user to use either
Google's keyboard or the built-in(by using textarea)?

The built-in one has a dictionary and some autocompletion, which could be good
or annoying... :)

~~~
olegp
Most likely annoying if you're writing code.

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bergie
Yes, a custom keyboard for this kind of app should include the necessary
buttons for JavaScript. Curly braces, etc.

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olegp
This is pretty good timing given we (Akshell) submitted to YC last night. Bad
timing in the sense that I've only had two hours of sleep.

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fjakobs
Good work. As author of Ace (the source code editor) I'm always happy to see
it being used. Do you guys have Cappuccino bindings for Ace you might consider
sharing?

~~~
olegp
Sure, happy to share anything you find useful and thank you for the awesome
work on Ace! Please send us an email here
<http://groups.google.com/group/akshell> and we'll take it from there.

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codedivine
In a similar vein, people should check out Ares SDK from Palm for WebOS. It is
an entirely browser based IDE for creating apps for WebOS, which are also
written using their Javascript/HTML/CSS based APIs.

edit: <https://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html>

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davej
Can somebody who has used both Akshell and Cloud9 IDE post a brief comparison?

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diamondhead
I didn't used both but gave try to bespin when it appeared (it evolved to
cloud9 as i know) and liked. it's an advantage to have a universal gui, to not
ignore users of other platforms.

btw, i put some effort to build an online ide 4 years ago. i stopped
maintaining it because my dream tool was evolved to firebug lite. anyway, my
died ide can be seen at vimeo.com/azer for some web nostalgia

~~~
sergimansilla
Just a small correction, Bespin evolved into Ace (which Akshell uses as their
code editor), which was created by the guys that created Cloud9 (Ajax.org).
Cloud9 is the actual IDE that uses Ace as its code editor.

Find ace here: <http://ace.ajax.org> and Cloud9 here: <http://c9.io>

~~~
diamondhead
thanks for correcting. I've tried akshell also, it seems great.

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keyle
That's really impressive. I've been working on a web only code editor for a
few weeks (on and off), so I can appreciate the work gone into this.

They built it using Objective-J (according to the source code).

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eitland
It took a while before I could find anything about the possibility to run on
own/3-party servers.

So far this is the most specific I've found:

    
    
        The engine will be open sourced soon to eliminate the
        vendor lock-in: you’ll be able to launch Akshell
        apps on your own server.
    

Anyone else knows the details?

Edit: Found some more details: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786>

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roblund
This is really cool. Your docs are well put together, and simple. It looks
like you put a decent amount of time into them, which I really appreciate. Too
many apps write the docs as an after-thought just before launch.

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tuhin
Is it just me or is the Name field actually a single word "username"?

I tried my name with space, it did not work but a single username worked just
fine! If latter, you might want to change the Name: field to Username:.

~~~
olegp
You're right, we're changing the copy to "Username". We also want to encourage
people to use the same username as on GitHub to make way for tighter
integration with GitHub in the future.

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d0m
Impressive. May I ask what libraries do you use for the menubar and all UI
widgets?

Also, is the web a "pretty proxy" that redirect _everything_ to a node.js
server which does the actual work?

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mklappstuhl
It's a kind of a Javascript framework called Cappucino, I assume.

~~~
olegp
Correct, link here: <http://cappuccino.org/>

~~~
tuhin
Just for the sake of references, the same is also possible with 280 North!

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olegp
yogsototh thank you for submitting this. We are seeing 150 or so concurrent
users on the site due to this at the moment. I'm retweeting some of the other
online reactions we're getting at <https://twitter.com/akshell_com>

~~~
biot
Interesting tweet: "... someone made the old @heroku for node.js" -- did
Heroku start out as a browser-based app builder?

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timinman
Yes, Heroku was the first. I tried it out. It was fun, but I think they
realised that though it was a novel idea, it was not the _Big Idea_, and they
replaced it with what they now have. That's pretty inspiring when you consider
how much work they threw away and how that decision has been rewarded.

~~~
olegp
Maybe the timing was just wrong? The browsers are fast enough now and users,
including developers, are much more comfortable with web apps.

~~~
bdotdub
I think it was less about speed and more about trying to replace peoples'
editor / workflow. People are very particular about the tools they use and
putting the editor and deployment in the browser doesn't do much in terms of
productivity (and probably more counterproductive than anything else)

Screenshot: [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/2/7/write-rails-apps-
in-y...](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/2/7/write-rails-apps-in-your-
browser)

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Animus7
Cool, but as a developer I'm having trouble seeing the market fit.

Like many devs, I have my preferred IDE and I'm religious about it. And I'm
fine with running my own server if it means I don't have to commit to a new
proprietary framework; that's kind of a huge deal.

I can see the benefit to budding web developers looking to get started, but
those are probably also least likely to be paying for dev tools. This seems to
be your approach in the docs, though.

Thoughts?

~~~
korenyushkin
The Akshell engine will be open sourced soon, it will eliminate the problem of
vendor lock-in. We strongly believe that web-based development environment are
the future; so we'll improve our IDE and add more advanced features to it to
provide cool experience.

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steve_b
Looks great! Do you think you'll be including support for CoffeeScript?

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korenyushkin
Yes, we think about it. CoffeeScript support should be easy to implement and
seamless to use.

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gregsadetsky
Great work, congratulations!

\- Can you make the save-preview-reload cycle (much) faster? I found out that
command-S triggered a Save, that's great. Does "Preview" have a keyboard
shortcut as well? Could you have tooltips (when 'mouseovering' the toolbar
icons) show the keyboard shortcut?

In TextWrangler (and BBEdit in the past), I have F1 as the "Run" item of the
shebang menu. It even works with unsaved files; developing/testing in Python
gets addictive: type, F1, type, F1, etc. (yes, yes, I think before I type...
;-) it's still nice to be able to quickly run your code..!)

\- Will it be possible to console.log() strings and/or objects?

~~~
korenyushkin
Thank you for the suggestions! We'll add shortcuts and tooltips. We were
rather conservative about it because wanted to collect some feedback.

The IDE will have real-time console for logging.

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te_chris
Very cool, now if someone could just make a Javascript IDE that works on the
desktop, I'm just beginning to work in node.js and do most of my PHP in
NetBeans, I really want an IDE that recognises that a project can be JS!

~~~
olegp
We are considering HTML5 offline support. So essentially you could do all the
editing locally and even test/run the modules that don't have core library
dependencies from within the browser rather than on the server.

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rstarkov
Took an hour and a bit yesterday to improve my eBay listings, like so:
<http://tinyurl.com/67dou5n> (link to the app, not eBay).

~~~
olegp
That's neat Roman, didn't know you were working on this. I'll have to put you
in touch with somebody else who wanted to build an eBay app on top of Akshell.

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TamDenholm
Be nice to see a non-OSX skin. :P

~~~
olegp
You could write your own, the interface is fairly open and Firebug is all you
need.

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ptn
Slick design, however, I don't understand the buttons. Why is 'eval' a
joystick and commit a box?

Also, whenever I hit Preview I get a 500.

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olegp
We're changing that joystick to a VCR like play button.

The commit one being a box hints at a shell or terminal, since we couldn't
find an official Git icon. Could maybe put the GitHub Octocat there - what do
you think?

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ionfish
How about the icon from the Git website?

    
    
        ---
        +++
    

<http://git-scm.com/>

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csomar
* A little bit faster. It's just fine for typing, but the menus and toolbar are a little bit slow.

* Why only GIT? Support Mercurial with bitbucket if possible.

* Add a context menu when user right clicks the mouse. It's important to have a copy/paste feature for files for example.

... and I'll move my JavaScript coding to it.

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riffraff
awesome work, but FWIW, the first thing I get in the git console for help is
two lines of "undefined", and an internal server error for "lol" in the eval
screen, using chrome on ubuntu. But you are probably being overloaded ATM so
I'll just wait and try again later :)

~~~
olegp
Yes, we're being hammered pretty hard. Thanks for pointing this out, will look
into it right away.

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dimmuborgir
Stupid question but what colorscheme is used for the editor? It's so easy on
eyes.

~~~
korenyushkin
It's a standard colorscheme of the Ace editor <http://ace.ajax.org/>

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ndl
I have Firefox "3.6.16pre," through Ubuntu.

When I try to access the app, it tells me that my browser isn't supported and
sends me to mozilla.com to download... Firefox 3.6.15

Version check bug?

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korenyushkin
Have you tweaked the User Agent header? We just check for the 'Gecko'
substring in it.

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growt
Wow, this looks really great.

One small suggestion: can you s/git// on the git shell? because I'm really
used to type "git <cmd>" in a shell and it's hard to change the habit.

~~~
korenyushkin
Thank you! We'll do something about it. May be we'll have a more universal
console, where git will be only one of the commands.

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js4all
Fantastic job. You made great progress on the IDE.

To get people's trust to invest work into your platform, it is essential to
provide a solution running on a server of their choice.

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olegp
Pretty cool, we made a top tweet:
<https://twitter.com/#!/hakimel/status/49800596823351297>

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nbaumann
Thanks, now I'm not going to pay attention in class... :)

~~~
olegp
What class is this? If it's anything programming related, perhaps we can
introduce Akshell into the curriculum? I'm already talking to some
universities in Europe.

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nbaumann
Some worthless Communication class, I'm all for introducing Akshell into that
class!

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Sloven
Great stuff. Thanks! It would be cool if left side panel be collapsible also
not just draggable. In manner as it in visual studio.

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matthodan
I've been thinking about building something like this, but haven't had the
time. I'm glad to see someone did it!

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kellysutton
Well. This is a good way to make my JS looking insignificant by comparison.

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mattmanser
Looks like it's built on Cappuccino:

<http://cappuccino.org/>

It's only recently become viable to use because of the performance
improvements all the browsers have been making to their javascript engines.
Last time I tried 280 slides it was painfully laggy
(<http://280slides.com/Editor/>).

Not that I'm belittling the effort, it's pretty amazing work nonetheless.

But have a play with cappuccino if you want to see what's doable!

~~~
kellysutton
Yeah. I saw a 280North presentation at FOWA Miami a few years back. Those guys
are great.

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tybris
Looks very well done. What I don't like is that is has a slow feel to it.

~~~
olegp
We're working to optimize it as much as we can. Which browser/OS/hardware are
you on? If you're not on Chrome, can you try running it in that first and let
me know if you see a speed increase?

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coldflame23
Nice job. a portable js IDE !

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dev_Gabriel
That's really cool.

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mikerg87
No love for IE9?!

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olegp
It works, but there are slight rendering errors with popups. We wanted to make
sure it was perfect before officially supporting it. If you're really keen to
see it in IE, you can fake the user agent headers to pretend to be Firefox or
Chrome.

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LordCope
awesome stuff!

