Comment by adrianscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianscott | Hacker News Reader

Hi, we wanted to invite a few of you into our private beta. This is still an early version of our product, but hopefully there's enough functionality that some will find useful.

CoderBuddy is free for commercial, non-commercial and open source projects.

There were a few posts on HN about having a web-based way to use Google App Engine for static sites, and that's one thing you can do with CoderBuddy.

You can build and publish web-based applications in Python on Google App Engine. CoderBuddy comes with an instantly updating test environment and integrated publishing to App Engine. we're starting to roll out a more advanced editor, the 'New Editor (beta)' link with tabs.

We invite your suggestions of who we should test this out with, and your top 3 feature requests. We've tried to make it really easy for someone to get started coding and publishing. We'd also love to hear from folks giving workshops soon who might want to try this out there.

Thanks, -Adrian (Napster founding investor, founder of social networking pioneer Ryze)

I was contemplating writing a site for appengine/python so I immediately jumped at trying this out. My biggest concern was that I wanted to be able to download the code when I was done, so I was glad to see it was an option to do just that. My ideal would be making that a git repository I could push or pull from. I also tried to use the site in Opera. I understand it's probably not common, but both editors seem to be broken. I think it would be a really good idea for this IDE to optionally integrate with webapp and hide away some of the framework-specific boilerplate behind slick interfaces.

Hi, thanks for the suggestion re interfaces and such, that sounds cool.

I've been able to reproduce problems with the new editor in my copy of Opera, but our classic editor is working fine for me. We'll investigate this more and see what we can do -- thanks for reporting it!

And yeah, we'd like to add more git support over time! ;)

Thanks,

What's the benefit here? App Engine already has a downloadable dev environment that gives you everything you need and is instantly updating as well. You can use the App Engine Launcher [0] to test multiple sites locally and then deploy to GAE. Best of all, you can operate at local speeds using an editor you're already comfortable with and it works even if you're sitting in a lead bunker with no connectivity.

What am I missing?

[0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/app-engine-launc...

Thanks, that's a relevant question. There are the overall benefits of moving to the cloud (as one experiences in gmail, google docs, etc.). Specifically in CoderBuddy, the benefits right now, which are going to be more valuable to some folks than others can include:

- quick accessibility, nothing to download, install and configure (especially useful for folks who've been meaning to play w/ App Engine for a while but haven't gotten around to it, and also folks who are newer to web application programming in general -- something we've seen in tests with workshops)

- cloud backup

- easy accessibility of code from different machines

- collaboration with multiple developers (you can add developers to a project)

As we build out the application and start growing a community, there'll be more neat things going on with collaboration and more.

Other than quick accessibility, using GitHub or other DVCS would address all the other points and probably offers a better solution in terms of multiple developers working off of their own independent copies without one developer's changes impacting everyone else. Unless, of course, CoderBuddy already offers multiple independent working sets with branching and merging of code as part of its feature set.

(fyi, we're fixing a little bug with publishing that some of you might experience.)

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