Cloud9 IDE - Your code anytime, anywhere | Hacker News Reader

Cloud9 IDE - Your code anytime, anywhere

cloud9ide.com

64 pointssergimansilla52 comments

Open Source IDE that runs in the cloud - and in your browser. Super fast and integrated with GitHub to make programming a joy!

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Not to sound cheap, but the first thing I note is the pricing. It's a little confusing. Does 33 cents per day mean that I'm only charged on days that I use it? So, if I use it Monday - Friday, I'll typically pay 7 Euros per month rather than 10 Euros? Or is it merely saying that it's only 33 cents per day? I'm also unsure what you mean by a workspace. In the UI photos, there's the concept of a "project", but I'm unsure if I would need multiple workspaces.

Then there's the cost itself. If 33 cents per day translates into $166.73 per year (after the conversion to USD), that seems a little expensive. The reason I say that isn't to say that software must be gratis, but that RubyMine's commercial license is only $149 and includes all upgrades for a year and you can upgrade your subscription after that point for just $99 per year. Personal licenses cost even less.

I'm not saying you don't have a great product - it looks absolutely gorgeous. I'm merely asking what the value is here. Is it that I don't have to install my IDE on multiple computers I might use? Is it that it will support multiple languages at the one low price (while JetBrains has different products for different languages)? Is it planned that it will support, say, running and debugging my Rails project without me having to configure environments on different machines?

I'm seriously asking because I do work on multiple machines (of different OSs), but I need to be able to run and debug (in my case Rails) projects and things like Eclipse, TextMate and a terminal, or even gedit with its terminal plugin will allow me to browse my file hierarchy, get an edit space with syntax highlighting, and run my application. Plus, while it can be annoying to set up another box, that doesn't happen very often and it means that things like relying on gems works.

It looks wonderful and I hope you keep improving it!

Great comments. So I just answered about pricing on a comment below, but here's the gist of it:

We charge per day to give you the flexibility of the cloud. Cloud9 is not an IDE alone, it's your tooling + test environment in the Cloud. So it's hosted, hosting costs money and we charge you for it. The idea is that if you are doing a commercial project with a good hourly rate, then paying 50 cents a day for the platform isn't a lot if it saves you significant time. If you're working on an open source project, Cloud9 is free.

The value is that you don't have to configure your systems, you dont have to keep them up to date and you'll be developing on a system that is identical to your deployment target. We're adding good deployment support soon to many different cloud hosters. This way deployment should be really a click of a button. Then there is the value of collaboration. Being able to work together with others from within Cloud9, editing and running code.

We are adding Ruby support soon, including step through debugging and gem support. We have webdav support and we'll soon support mounting your drive on your local machine for external applications to access your files.

For now, try Cloud9 for your open source projects and see how you like it. There are many more features to come in the coming weeks and months.

So, the one thing that you didn't answer was the difference between a "project" and a "workspace" if there is one. I do have hobby things that aren't open source where 50 cents per day would be doable, if unwelcome. However, if it's 50 cents per day per project, that can add up pretty fast and $55/mo isn't a trivial cost considering that I can run my development and test stuff off my machine (granted, with the caveat of having to do all the annoying setup myself).

I'll probably get an account for open-source later today to play around with, but if your Ruby stuff is really good (when it lands) and works well for collaboration, I could easily justify $15/mo to my boss and sometimes one isn't trying to create the solution for every cheap hobbyist out there. It can be good to be the Basecamp of IDEs and maybe that's how you should sell it (in contrast to my comparisons to Eclipse and RubyMine).

39 Euro/month?! As an individual developer I get Rubymine for $69 and can use it as much as I want. What's up with the per day pricing? Who wants to pay his IDE + workspace on a n per day basis? This is about the strangest pricing I've ever seen.

Well, the idea is this: Normally you have all your stuff on your own computer. You'll install all the software you need, like your database and runtimes and any SDK. With Cloud9 all that stuff lives in the Cloud. It's hosted and it's accessible for you from anywhere.

So, like any cloud service, the hosting costs money. We are offering this for free when you work on open source projects. But when you are doing a commercial project for a customer and you like the benefits of being in the cloud with not only your editor, but your entire test environment, then you pay something for it. One of the advantages of cloud services is that you have flexibility, so with the pay per day we offer the flexibility to only pay for the use of the platform when you need it. Our thought is that if you're doing a project that makes you a couple of hundred dollars a day, 50 cents for the editor is not much if it saves you a lot of time.

With that said, we still have some way to go before all the time savers we have planned are in Cloud9. We're working on a very cool Git UI, great deployment integration and many many other features. More important for you is the Ruby support that is upcoming, including step through debugging. In the mean time use cloud9 for your open source projects and see how it feels for you.

Best of luck javruben - you'll have a lot of haters who won't understand the value prop, so you have a lot of difficult marketing ahead of you.

I thought about going into this market awhile ago, but there's a huge battle to be fought against ~20 year old editors that have been around the block and have become an external growth to some developers.

That said, you guys are headed in the right direction, good job charging and getting honest feedback on the utility so early. I just hope you're able to differentiate between 'features' and 'benefits' while going forward.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x2

HTH

This is based on ACE, which was formerly known as Skywriter, or Mozilla Bespin.

http://ace.ajax.org/

http://c9.io/about.html

Sorta. There were actually three Skywriters: Bespin prototype (Thunderhead-based), Bespin Reboot (SproutCore/jQuery-based), and ACE. ACE postdates the rename from Bespin to Skywriter. They originated as three completely separate codebases, although there's been a fair amount of cross-pollination.

ACE didn't begin as a Mozilla project, although it was finally chosen as the basis on which to build Skywriter the product (which will be used for the Firefox Add-ons Builder, in particular).

I spotted issues with the signup process yesterday, the guys have done a good job of chatting to me on twitter to try and resolve the issue, so thumbs up.

On a separate note, I agree with the comments about the per day pricing. It is a little confusing and I would rather just see a monthly subscription cost, with a few plan variants based on # of projects and users. Your making me think to hard about paying for something when I have to start calculating how much it will cost me. You should definitely consider simplifying it.

I disagree with the comments around pricing though. I think that estimated cost is well worth not having hassle, and when you consider it to the cost of say your mobile phone bill. Just ask which do you use the most, more importantly which one is making you the money in the first place.

If I'm honest I think the pricing is a on the low side, However I wouldn't limit the free plan to "open-source" projects either. Depending on how you are quantifying open source. If you require a public github repo then I would potentially suggest it's a bad thing. People need chance to use your IDE for a project to see if they are willing to pay. Allowing only say one or two projects makes more sense I think.

The site (awesomely) says that most of the code powering it is openly available on Github (https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9) - out of interest, which parts have you developed separately for your service?

The platform code is private, but you can always run the IDE locally, or on your own open-source webserver.

Pretty cool, I have it running[1] on my box now, but I can't seem to figure out what the Run feature is supposed to..I'm guessing run the code in the second pane, but it's not clear with no docs...Also, is this designed to execute only for Javascript? Your site at http://c9.io is down and I don't see anything in Google cache so I can't read up there either.

[1]: http://awesomescreenshot.com/0a28fjb51

Reminds me of http://www.coderun.com which supports C#, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. (and is free)

I'm curious to know what I get for this paid version? Is it mostly the Git support?

A difference is that we support actual step through debugging for javascript. Indeed git support is another differentiator. Our Git UI will be released shortly too. We have a pluggable architecture to very easily extend cloud9 with new features. We are working with many developer oriented companies to add their services and tooling to Cloud9. Our aim for Cloud9 is to provide a full PaaS for software development in the cloud.

Going to http://cloud9ide.com/contact.html gives the google maps api key warning, you should fix that.

By the way, beautiful design in both page and product. Really really awesome.

Thanks for the heads up, we are fixing it right now!

Does it support textmate/sublime style syntax highlighting?

How do I actually get it to do anything? Clicking on a github project in the list does nothing.

Ok, I clicked fork (I don't think this is intuitive at all, why would you want to fork your own projects?), and I'm editing code.

Things that would prohibit me from using it:

* Can't upload my own tmTheme files.

* Cant't seem to change font, ignores my browser's "monospaced" selection. Why?

* Can I select branch somehow? This is not obvious. Perhaps in the project pane?

So far it's pretty frustrating in all fairness, and whilst it's a cool idea, wouldn't really make me switch from Sublime Text + Cyberduck.

When you are on your own computer, you clone from github to edit your project. See cloud9 as your own computer, but then in the cloud, accessible from anywhere. It should say 'clone' instead of 'fork' though. We'll change that.

- Themes: There is a converter script already in the open source project of Cloud9 on github. We'll add a way to upload your own themes soon.

- Font: Good suggestion. I'll add this to the feature todo list.

- Git: There is full git command line support. We're working on a Git UI, that's coming soon.

Thanks for the feedback, we know it's still early, but we're adding features very quickly.

Thanks for the reply. I do like the idea and it is interesting. I'll look into Cloud9's OSS project as it would be really useful to have, for instance, Cloud9 installed on a development server, then be able to login from anywhere and edit the code (though security wise it could be hazardous).

It's still buggy:

* Sometimes when loading a project, it gets stuck at "Loading..."

* When editing a file, sometimes the Enter button doesn't return. It works if I hold the Enter key down but then it adds a ton of returns.

* The buttons on the right don't really do anything yet, except for the collaborators section. There isn't a label or hint box so I'm not sure what exactly they are for.

With that said, I love the idea of this and really want this to become a viable alternative to Textmate + desktop development, which will hopefully improve the pace and standard at which progress happens.

Looking forward to Ruby support.

Thanks for the reports Melvin. We're fixing the project loading. I haven't been able to reproduce the stuck Enter button yet. The buttons on the right are used for debugging. I'll make sure we'll add some tooltips on them.

There are a couple places in the CSS where Tahoma or Trebuchet MS are given as the font families without any fallbacks - lots of us linux folks don't have fonts like Tahoma, so an Arial or Verdana fallback would be nice so we don't see our ugly default serif fonts.

Also, can't commit anything here.

This page --> http://c9.io/signin.html doesn't load for me (except for the banner) in: Google Chrome 9.0.597.98, WinXP

Works on Firefox.

Works over here on Chrome 10 but thanks for reporting, we will try to reproduce your environment and fix it!

The homepage doesn't work for me on safari 5.0.3 on mac. The "I say what's this" link doesn't do anything and none of the screenshots on the bottom of the page are visible. I thought the page was like that and was anxiously looking for screenshots.

The webkit inspector reports the following error: apf_release.js:1 TypeError: Result of expression 'this.$ext' [null] is not an object.

I like these kind of projects/efforts and it looks great, but this thing is quite buggy. And some parts, like the sign up process might not even be buggy but just bad workflow.

And it's too expensive IMHO. You need to make money, but for what it offers now, at least to me, it's not worth it.

Other than that, hopefully you'll improve it and make it a real online IDE.

We just launched, and we are trying to squash every bug we run into. Could you be more specific about the 'buggy' part you mention? Some particulars about it would really help us to make it better, we would really appreciate it!

This is probably more usability than a bug, but when I clicked from HN to the site, I clicked on login without checking the rest of the screen, as usually the login screen contains some link to register. These days i'm used to, when I see a 'sign in with xxx' (oAuth) that login / register do the same thing, even if you don't have an account.

To me it felt a bit unstable because of this. Although it's a matter of reading everything on the screen, I would be surprised if anyone actually does that, so probably better to change the flow in that case.

Anyway, after that I entered a Github url (naive as I am) which is private, but in my Github account with which I'm signed up to Cloud9IDE. I got a not so user friendly popup saying an error occured, with a key and some JSON included.

So I concluded I cannot use private repositories (?) and clicked on the + to add a new project, typed in Test and clicked create. I clicked open source in the follow up dialog and no extra users. After clicking next it suddenly said 'Forking, this could take a few seconds'. I thought; what is it forking? This is an empty project. Then another popup with about the same error as before. It appeared that even though I created a fresh, empty project, it took my GIThub URL and tried to use that! So instead of my 'Test' empty project, it now showed the name of my private project from Github, with no files in it.

Any comments on the pricing btw? EDIT: nevermind, answered while I was typing this.

A small nitpick on the landing page: your testimonial should have the opening quotation mark as a “ and the closing quotation mark as an ”. Right now they're both ” and it looks a little strange.

I'm getting a sky blue screen of nothingness on dashboard.html after signing in via github. Chrome 9.0.597.107 on Snow Leopard.

When going back to it again, the front sign in with github link tells me that someone already has my user id.

I got the same. Just click the 'sign in' link at the top, then 'Sign in with Github' and it should take you to your account.

Yah, though that just gets me back to the sky blue screen of nothingness.

We're seeing this as well. The problems are being investigated.

Same, and I tried again with the same result a few times. Looks promising though - looking forward to giving it a try!

[edit] tried on FF 3.6.13 and Chrome 10, snow leopard

'Sign in with Github' is broken. I get an error message:

    User '<myusername>' already used for another account.

Really? There is no way for me to link my Github account then?

Very nice idea! It seems to me, editing and launching code without having to install anything locally can be very handy in some cases.

One question about security: Does it support HTTPS?

It doesn't yet, but it will be supported very soon, we are working on it!

How well does it do with non-javascript code? If I could code ruby on rails on it, and deploy from w/in it to Heroku, I'd sign up today. (happy feature creep!)

We are working on it. We aim to support all the major languages and their popular frameworks soon. For now you have syntax highlighting for Ruby and more languages, which combined with GitHub integration already makes it a sweet platform to develop on.

Does that include MS languages (C#, etc.?)

We are looking into Mono Support, but we don't have a date set for this on the roadmap.

  we don't have a date set for this on the roadmap

Read: never going to happen

It will happen, but there are many languages out there, each with its own runtimes, debuggers, etc. We are first focusing on making the IDE solid and stable, and then we will focus on what people want. In fact, thanks to the work done by the Mono guys C#/F# shouldn't be difficult to get working, but for now there are more important hings to do.

That is really great!

How are you planning to achieve that? Via some X-to-LLVM-to-JS compiler? And what about system functions? Emulating some simple filesystem? Sockets would also be nice...

I would use this for PHP development.

I really like the idea of having an editor that I can play with on all of the things that I don't want to, or can't, setup an editor on (iPad, various laptops, etc). Is it possible to have a non-hosted version that I could put on my own servers as well, that I can then access from anywhere I wanted?

The aesthetic quality is superb by the way. Who does your UX?

I was just thinking about something like this a few weeks ago, mostly the Git integration being a killer feature. Good luck!

What about basic IDE functionality such as folding, code/content assist, etc.?

Cloud9IDE is based on Ace*

Ace does not yet support code folding I think.

It was discussed as possible feature but not yet implemented as far as I know: http://groups.google.com/group/cloud9-ide/browse_thread/thre...

*an open source project based on the work from the people at Cloud9IDE (ajax.org) and Mozilla (Bespin / SkyWriter

Wasn't Cloud9 open source? I can't find any link to the source code.

here it is: http://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9

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