Has anyone tried this? Is there any improvements in performance/code sense intelligence? Is is anywhere closer to Intellij IDEA?
This is not a new version of the existing Eclipse (or Intellij). It's not a desktop app at all, it's a web server that starts and then your browser opens the EclipseCHE "web app." The IDE is merely a web interface - everything is happening on the CHE server (which would make the most sense if you install it on a separate machine altogether).
As far as the IDE, it's actually kinda amazing for a web app. If the browser chrome was missing it would seem like a desktop app (except the menus are in the wrong place for OSX). The intellisense doesn't seem to be working yet as far as I can tell. Maybe this is just PHP, though? It shows valid PHP code highlighted in red as if it were an error (edit - restart seems to have fixed this). I wish so badly that one of the dark themes for Eclipse looked this good, though. I've tried for days to get a decent dark Eclipse theme going - they all suck.
It seems that it may be creating a docker container for your project. You don't open local files on your machine (there is actually an 'upload' function to add a file to your project though). The files don't exist on your normal filesystem - they exist on the server, perhaps in a container, or just some internal folder structure that the server controls..? It seems to want to handle it all magically, which means I can't easily try it out on one of my existing apps. This is not really normal for my PHP workflow, but perhaps it would be perfect for those who have their app already in docker containers?
I can't get an application to run at this point. I have docker installed, but it just hangs with the message "Your request is queued waiting for a node to become available..."
Overall, it looks extremely interesting - especially for a team environment where everything is containerized. Just point a new team member at a URL - and the IDE and server environment is 100% set up, ready for them to start coding, debugging and running the app. There would be essentially zero setup time for working on your app.
I found the dark themes to look great with certain, staged screenshots. But then when you use it, the scrollbars are blaring white. Or the bar that shows your code blocks can't be styled (controlled by the OS). So you wind up with a mostly dark theme that has 2 or 3 blaring, ugly, mismatched elements that defeat the purpose.
Styling the editor window is something I've spend days tediously trying to tweak a nice pastel color pallet (that pretty much every app with a dark theme uses). But all the included ones are bright neon colors or just radically weird color choices. I've been able to get my code window 95% the way I'd want, but then all of the other windows like the explorer or the console don't match! The settings are all over the place and sometimes take a restart of Eclipse to if you got the right setting or not.
Basically I just gave up with the dark theme because it seems there's no way to get it consistent.
If you are playing with it - try out 4.0 branch, it has the new designs & architecture which makes it near localhost.
What we are doing behind the scenes is binding your workspace into an environment which is powered by machines. You can either have a localhost machine or a docker machine. Right now each workspace can only be bound to a single machine environment, but in a couple months we'll release multi machine bindings, so that you could launch a docker compose, for example, as a way to bind your workspace.
The binding of your workspace happens behind the scenes. When you boot or shutdown the workspace, we take care of managing the machines. If you are using docker, then those machines are running out of process. If on linux we use docker natively. We use docker machine on mac or windows.
Once the machines are booted, we bind all of your projects into the workspace, which are mounted into the machines. Inside of the workspace machine, we launch another version of che. Based upon the programming language you choose, we are running intellisense services inside of the machines. For java, we actually run the native JDT code.
We then put RESTful wrappers around this, which enables the browser to have full intellisense capability. We have more work to do in integrating the JDT code with our restful wrappers and the UI, but it works well.
We now support refactoring, a lot of content suggestions, find usages, and so forth.
You can snapshot your workspace and use that image to load it again.
Your files are dual mounted between Che the workspace manager and your workspace environment. If you edit files in one, they are updated in the other. so you can ssh into your workspace or not. We provide a terminal into the workspace as well.
When you execute a command, we translate that into a process and then docker exec it inot a machine as well.