Slashdot Mirror
Web-based IDEs Edge Closer To the Mainstream
snitch writes "Last week Mozilla released Bespin, their web-based framework for code editing, and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of the web-based Eclipse workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like Heroku, a web-based IDE and hosting environment for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream."
As someone drooling over the insanely low prices of light weight netbooks with weak Atom processors, I was kind of lamenting that there wasn't something I could host on my beefy Linux desktop back home that acts as a code repository and compilation machine while all my development is done through a netbook.
... but wouldn't that be awesome and liberating?
I'm not too keen on someone else's server being the host for my web based IDE and holding my code but if they could make it so you could attach to any server (including one from your home) I would be all over this.
I know it sounds like I'm just coming full circle and mimicking mainframes from the 80s with the ability to cool and keep a quad core beast at home with a terabyte of storage mirrored across two drives while keeping a nice cool easy to move netbook
My work here is dung.
I do believe you've been had. His comment about Win32 strikes me as the intended 'tell' for his sarcasm. The point being that developing desktop applications in a web-based IDE doesn't make much sense. Which I do agree with. The two environments are not at all integrated.
Of course, the AC conveniently ignores the massive business of web development which *could* benefit from centralized IDE services.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is rather off-topic, but Sumo-Paint still impresses me, it's not quite as good as Photoshop, etc, but it comes very close...
If Bespin, etc can get anywhere near that functionality/power... it will certainly be useful. Especially in classroom situations, where it can be sandboxed in the browser.
However, I am curious about how one would go about compiling, or is it strictly code-editing, online-only apps?
I'm a Sage developer, and our only GUI is a web interface. Run Sage on your local machine, and you serve to localhost. As Sage developers use the GUI, we're getting more attached to it, and we keep adding more IDE-like features. Recently, there have been discussions to make it easier to edit Sage directly from the GUI. With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of the past.
I won't claim that Sage will become a great IDE -- that's not our plan: we want to make great math software. But, the way that people write software is changing. Local editing tools are the best right now because they've had the most time to develop, and today's developers have grown with them. In 10 years? I'm not sure that the younger generation of developers is going to stick with a local copy of emacs. More and more tools are migrating to the web; I don't care to predict that the world isn't going to change.