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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."
I had this great idea for a product. It would clean the soil in your yard. The soil itself would be clean soil after using the product. In other words, even if you rolled around in it and got the soil all over you, you would still be clean.
Strangely, it was a solution to a problem that no one had. It figures that I shouldn't get my product ideas from Bill & Ted
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.
Don't get me wrong. . . I think it is an amazing technical feat, but is it really practical to require internet access for this?
I think it is time that we as a community get behind a project that allows these remote apps to be cached locally for fully disconnected use (with a desktop runtime -- something akin to Adobe Air). It would be great to visit the site once and thereafter run it local (and get updates later while connected). As long as I'm fantasizing, I think we should try to make this a standard for new desktop apps -- written like gadgets, but full blown apps.
What do you think? Are there projects out there that are working on this already?
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.
As people romance the scale and stability of the mainframe and move towards centralized, mainframe approaches, they forget the reasons that gave birth to the PC revolution to begin with.
Having your stuff on your computer is an immensely liberating act. No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
On the other hand, with a PC, particularly as applications move towards more open file designs, you get much more control, more choice, and as much power as you would like to invest in.
This is my sig.
I'm going to remain skeptical.
Net apps are great, but their performance in many areas is unavoidably way below that of native apps. When you can do everything with JS, you can be reasonably speedy if the processing requirements aren't huge and your browser doesn't leak memory too badly. (Dammit, Firefox!)
But when you need to persist data, you have to spawn an ajax query and that 1/10 to 1/4 second (even over a fast network connection) just isn't comparable from the user perspective to hitting a local HD. As local mass storage switches from HD to solid-state over the next couple of years, the difference between native and web apps is going to increase, not decrease.
Besides, half of these things are going to be ad-supported, right? At least in my experience, the performance of most websites has decreased the last 3 years or so as they hit and increasing number of different servers. It's typical for a single page to load content, ads, local javascript, stylesheets, and analytics from 10 or more pages. Each of these connections triggers its own DNS query. Every connection and every DNS lookup has a %age chance of hanging for a few seconds due to network traffic, server load, or what have you - as a result almost 10% of web pages I try to load these days stall for a few seconds. Do you really want that kind of crap going on in the background while you're developing? I don't.
Hah! Just reminded of a most annoying example! Slashdot, for me, loads pretty much instantly. But every time I post and click that "preview" button, there's a five-second wait before the preview actually shows up. That'll be fun, and additional five seconds for every classfile save in my IDE...
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Real programmers use butterflies.
I am officially gone from
The one does not have anything to do with the other. One provides a managed place for you to put your code, the other lets you write code in a comfortable unified environment. Why would you want to integrate those two?
When working in a team environment, integrating the two makes for another channel of communication, especially between geographically separated team members (which seems to be an increasing trend in my personal contracts; I've gone from originally working in a company where source code control was done by shouting over the cubicle walls, to a situation where I'm getting up 3 hours earlier than normal to collaborate with coders in European time zones). It also seems to me to greatly simplify the autosave process if the two were integrated, especially in a web environment- thus capturing all branches of the code automatically server-side, for the project manager to integrate the final code for build.
Of course, this all would require at least two major advancements to the current codesets in TFA:
1. enough speed for professional software development (something that even current client-side IDEs sometimes lack for me, though the problem might be more of a PEBCAK, or more precisely, a PEBBAF (Problem exists between brain and fingers, instead of between Chair and Keyboard).
2. sufficient integration between the data entered in the client-side web interface and the code repository to show changes when two team members are working on the same source code file.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I have stopped using my local Notepad. I use a web based Notepad these days.
It totally rocks.
Planning to try a web based browser next so that I can uninstall Firefox from my machine.
Why is that tempting? It seems like the equivalent of paying second graders to do your taxes.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.