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Open Source Raspberry Pi WebIDE Alpha Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the because-why-not dept.

ptorrone writes "Adafruit, the NYC based open-source hardware company led by Ladyada released their open-source Raspberry Pi WebIDE alpha today. Its goal is to be 'The easiest way to develop code on your Raspberry Pi.' To get up and running head on over to learn.adafruit.com/webide and follow the installation and setup instructions. It uses Bitbucket, and any code changes you make will be synced to your Bitbucket account. Adafruit chose Bitbucket over GitHub because they offer free secure accounts, which is very important for a Web-based IDE."

2 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. This was stupid the first time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    .. and it's still stupid.

    Requiring a more expensive host in order to develop for a cheap device that's intended to be self-hosted is in no possible way The easiest way to develop code on your Raspberry Pi."

    The BBC Micro didn't require a mainframe to make hello-world, and neither does the RP. The notion is ridiculous and there is absolutely no practical use for this.

    1. Re:This was stupid the first time... by coop0030 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This kind of response was certainly expected, thank you for the feedback though!

      We built this because we thought that we could help people start quickly to get up and running with programs to blink LED's with their Raspberry Pi, or read temperatures with sensors attached to the GPIO pins (oh, and learn a little python, ruby or what have you, in the process!). We want it to be the easiest editing environment to use and setup on the Raspberry PI (low barrier to entry). We haven't built the guided experience yet, but you can kind of see which area of programming we're focusing on by looking at the following github repository:
      https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Raspberry-Pi-Python-Code

      Also, you have to start somewhere with someone just starting out in this quite complex, and layered environment. What better way than to have an editor that is pre-loaded with some basic scripts that will blink an LED, or read temperature and humidity off a sensor breakout, on their Raspberry Pi with little effort in an environment they're already comfortable with (a browser)?

      Sure, they could start by first learning basic unix command line, then their editor of choice, and git, and python, and then interfacing with the RPi's GPIO pins, and on and on. We're just trying to remove some of these barriers.

      An expert developer with loads of experience may not need this editor (but it is pretty convenient to just plug the pi into an ethernet port, and start hacking away in your browser...). But for someone that isn't sure how to navigate directories in a command line environment...well, this might help them out a bit (we even include a pretty powerful terminal emulator that may help them learn this!).

      We're hoping to keep adding more advanced features as we go. We're releasing quite early in order to gather feedback to make it better suited for more people earlier in the process.