Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Experiences With Online IDEs For Web Development?
Qbertino writes: I'm toying with the thought of moving my web development (PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript with perhaps a little Python and Ruby thrown in) into the cloud. The upsides I expect would be: 1) No syncing hassles across machines. 2) No installation of toolchains to get working or back to work — a browser and a connection is all that would be required. 3) Easy teamwork. 4) Easy deployment. 5) A move to Chrome OS for ultra-cheap laptop goodness would become realistic.
Is this doable/feasible? What are your experiences? Note, this would be for professional web development, not hobbyist stuff. Serious interactive JS, non-trivial PHP/LAMP development, etc. Has anyone have real world experience doing something like this? Maybe even experience with moving to a completely web-centric environment with Chrome OS? What have you learned? What would you recommend? How has it impacted your productivity and what do you miss from the native pipelines? What keeps you in the cloud, and enables you to stay there? Are you working "totally cloud" with a team and if so, how does it work out/feel? Does it make sense? As for concrete solutions, I'm eyeing Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, CodeEnvy but also semi-FOSS stuff like NeutronDrive. Anything you would recommend for real world productivity? Have you tried this and moved back? If so, what are your experiences and what would need to be improved to make it worthwhile? Thanks for any insights.
Is this doable/feasible? What are your experiences? Note, this would be for professional web development, not hobbyist stuff. Serious interactive JS, non-trivial PHP/LAMP development, etc. Has anyone have real world experience doing something like this? Maybe even experience with moving to a completely web-centric environment with Chrome OS? What have you learned? What would you recommend? How has it impacted your productivity and what do you miss from the native pipelines? What keeps you in the cloud, and enables you to stay there? Are you working "totally cloud" with a team and if so, how does it work out/feel? Does it make sense? As for concrete solutions, I'm eyeing Cloud9, CodeAnywhere, CodeEnvy but also semi-FOSS stuff like NeutronDrive. Anything you would recommend for real world productivity? Have you tried this and moved back? If so, what are your experiences and what would need to be improved to make it worthwhile? Thanks for any insights.
I spent some time with Cloud9 and although it was generally usable, it was just unresponsive enough as to be annoying. Also, I prefer a standalone machine so if I don't have any wifi access, I can still work. Recent plane trips come to mind as an example.
Simply dont. If you are intending to do code professionally then you should be worrying about the security of your code against competitors / thieves /industrial espionage, and the worst way to do this is to put your code "in the cloud". And I will not touch the point of the performance of a "cloud IDE" because others have already shown examples to exhaustion. In short: Very, very bad idea.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I know I'll get modded down for this, but usually only take web development projects that let me write in Visual Studio. Why?
1) People who are looking for C#-based projects have MONEY (they have to to afford non-Express SQL Server) and often pay their bills on time
2) Unit testing is easy to do...and my clients usually happily pay for a full test suite as a self-documenting quality check on my code
3) Expectations of bleeding-edge look-and-feel are often lower, which means I spend more time on the app and less time on browser-specific rendering and Javascript BS
For my own use (my marketing sites) I tend to build on frequently-updated web portal tools (often in PHP/JS/TS) and only do a few tweaks around the edges in a text editor like Sublime because just about all of what I need to interact with the rest of the world has already been written by somebody else.