Developers: a new kind of IDE arrives in Cloud9 (First look) | Hacker News Reader

Developers: a new kind of IDE arrives in Cloud9 (First look)

scobleizer.com

25 pointsjaffoneh24 comments

Having an IDE as a "service" is a pretty big leap for me. Paying a monthly fee for this is beyond my current ability to fathom.

For $22/month I can get 10 users on a private github - the 2 ios devs can use xcode, the 3 rails guys can use textmate, etc..

When you compare this against the more "corporate" stuff - VS or IntelliJ, well...most large corporations aren't ready to store source outside of their firewall, and they have volume licensing anyways.

Eh, but I'm generally wrong about this sorta thing anyways...

I actually started using it today, maybe two hours before it got posted on Scobleizer and while I didn't experience any super-fancy code assist features, it is fast, responsive and does not get in the way. Fell in love right away and I am basically not a fan of hosted coding environments like this but as my code is pretty much standalone JS for now it seemed to make perfect sense.

Basically I only went there because I had it bookmarked a few days ago and Aptana crashed my box when I tried to create a new file (yeah, I know, that was a wild idea). But now I am kind of glad I did.

Too bad it's down right now but if you can't get through and haven't seen it yet, give it a shot some time later.

Aptana crashed my box...

That's why I don't use IDE's. ;)

Because bugs are restricted to IDEs?

It appears http://cloud9ide.com/ is down and thus the problem with this solution.

We're back up. A combination of reaching maturity and offline support will make this a problem of the past.

How would I use it? I wouldn't. I have my editor in the cloud. I log into my remote server via a terminal and I fire up Vim. ;) There are plenty of people who have tried the editor in the cloud thing, nobody seems to have been able to build anything which has stuck. Meanwhile, Vim and Emacs are still going strong and perhaps the best editors available. It would be tough to create something which could provide an alternative to something so versatile and has had years of community add-ons and improvements being made.

I think you're right about the versatility aspects. If a cloud editor is going to grow I think it's going to come out of somewhere like Heroku. Where it exists in one "opinionated" niche and can be customized specifically to work with that environment.

Interesting you mention Heroku as they first started out with a Rails editor. That seemed to be one of their big features aside from hosting Rails applications.

I followed the roots of this with interest, back when it was called Bespin, then SkyWriter. The idea is compelling: most web developers just need a highlighting-capable text editor with online connectivity. Many of us work directly on staging servers, so in theory if there was a capable web-based editor around, you could work from pretty much any computer without having to install something. You could log into your web-based editor and all your bookmarks, SSH certs, everything would be there.

Now, Cloud9 is - from what I understand - the commercial version of this concept. Right now, signup seems to be broken, but I'm curious how it turned out.

Sign-up is back up, the entire site was down for a moment. We're improving monitoring systems to deal with this better in the future.

Great, thanks! I just signed up and tried it out. You guys did an awesome job! The gitHub checkout was flawless and the editor is really nice.

There is, however, one "problem" that prevents me from switching to c9 and trying it out for a few days: as far as I can tell c9 allows us to edit files on your server and then push the updated project back into the git repository. For a web dev like me this would mean a commit after every edit and then I'd have to manually pull the changes from GitHub onto my dev server every single time.

I don't know if I'm the exception here, but I pretty much need my editor to save files directly onto my server (preferably via SFTP). The git integration thing is still great, it's just not compatible with my workflow to do a commit and manual pull for every edit. I don't spend hours making changes and then test them all at once - instead I make small changes, save, and then run tests immediately.

Yep, SSH/SFTP integration is currently number 1 on the list, stay tuned!

Cool, keep up the great work! :-)

Having worked at what was probably the first company to build an IDE in the browser (Bungee Labs) that subsequently crashed and burned, I wish them luck with it. I think you can be successful, but you have to VERY carefully target your customers (and if you think "every" developer is interested, you might as well hand the investors their money back and go home now).

I believe this is based on what used to be called Mozilla Bespin. Interesting project to be sure. I'm skeptical overall though.

I watched for a few seconds, then jumped a few seconds later, and then closed the window.

A few reactions:

- show me, not tell me. lots of blah blah

- i still hate "building 43" as a name. it's a strange reference to a part of another company; is rackspace SO limp that they have no corporate culture whatsoever?

I would be very wary. You are trusting the "cloud" even for access to work on your code let alone store and secure it. I just don't think it's there yet. Maybe I'm just old school but I like having a copy of my code where I know it's safe and secure and where I can get to it on a moments notice if needed.

I really like these ideas, and I'd love to see one of them go. I did notice the demo url was 127.0.0.1 though... I know, it's just a demo..

That said, one question.. Do you guys work 100% in your own IDE? And hosted (not localhost)? I think that's a must if you want other shops to use it.

Also I think a zero-barrier demo on your site would be huge. I ought to be able to click a link, land in an editor, and write some running code, a-la the mongodb shell on their site.

I had to demo Cloud9 on local URL since i didn't have internet there, that made debugging an online process a bit hard. We wil have a much more capable offline version of Cloud9 with online/offline mode soon. Our entire team is developing and debugging Cloud9 within Cloud9. Its a great way to stabilize. We dont really have database support yet in our cloud version, so only the devs that do the UI / DB-less backend work do that on the hosted version right now. This should become 100% hosted pretty soon.

Thanks for filling in the details :)

Hmm... now maybe I can use my Cr48 for something...

This seems awesome! Is there a way to connect this to a server via SSH or something? So that you can work on your development server from everywhere.

We have a short-list of features we are adding first besides stabilization, SFTP/SSH support is pretty much number 1.

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