"Can you selfhost the server-side?" is the biggest question If not, you're buying into dev platform-as-a-service.
Also, self-hosted or not, if the system is web-based, that's a dealbreaker.
But if you're just starting out, with a small and quite possibly partly outsourced team, this could be a cheaper and faster way to spin things up. Just like many companies don't have their own datacenter anymore, and even fewer have them literally onsite in a server closet.
I too would rather do this. Trusting Amazon with my personal development setup doesn't sound like a good idea; they have the power to shut that down completely at the click of a button.
Not that client is your browser, but locally installed VSCode.
I hate fighting IDEs (whether it's IntelliJ or VSCode) before I can write useful code. Javascript has gotten so bloated that half the challenge of any new project is setting up tooling. God, I'd love a 1-click "create new project" and then a GDocs-like IDE in the cloud, and would happily pay to never have to configure that again myself.
Not sure why this needs to be something developers can’t fine tune for themself.
If you enjoy that sort of tinkering, more power to you... you're probably a better dev & devops person than I am.
And are you aware of platforms like Cloud9 that have been available for 10 years that give you an online developer environment?
Honestly the only two reasons I personally don’t use them is because (1) I’ve never been at any company or place in the world where the Internet was truly 100% available with dependably low latency and near zero jitter and (2) nothing beats IntelliJ for me.
What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end.
It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare.
I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know.
shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.
I also use JetBrains’s products extensively. I used to have on intellij settings repository for all products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, Webstorm), but I found the same issue that the settings wouldn’t sync in the way I wanted. I now have separate settings repositories for each product. This seems to be working better, although, it does require copying new shortcuts to each product.
I haven’t tried solely using IntelliJ Ultimate, so maybe I will see if I can configure that to work for different programming languages. I have been reluctant to do so, because the appeal of IntelliJ for me is that it makes it easy to work with a programming language. I don’t want to have to configure IntelliJ Ultimate when I want to use Kotlin or want to use Python. Maybe it has a nice way of handling that?
Hmm, that's actually the point of the Ultimate version, I believe: it supports multiple languages quite nicely, from what I can tell. Finally convinced my work to pay for Ultimate so I no longer have to switch between PHPStorm and PyCharm.
To add support for a new language, you just download the first-party plugin pack (like Python plugin by Jetbrains for Python). Then point it to the interpreter/compiler, which can be set as a per-machine default and then overridden on a per-project basis as needed (like if you needed to use NumPy for a specific project, or a different NPM version). Most of the time it's just auto-detected and works out of the box... it only gets tricky if you have, say, macOS Python 2.7, homebrewed 3.x, and some strays in a Docker container. It'll detect all the ones it can and ask you to choose.
But other than that, projects can use multiple languages simultaneously with no additional configuration. You can even (in the IDE) combine multiple repos into one project, each with a separate git but presented together in the editor. Or use SQL/GraphQL inline in a JS file, for example. It all works pretty seamlessly if you DO have the right license (Ultimate).
In fact I believe the language-specific products are, for the most part*, stripped-down versions of Ultimate. It's all built on a relatively modular plugin system, with each language or module (like the database browser) as a plugin -- but they can't all be activated on every product, like you can't add the DB plugin to PyCharm Community Edition. Ultimate just allows you to enable every plugin.
*That's not 100% the case, maybe only like 90-95%. I have noticed some minor GUI differences between the products, such as being able to collapse buttons... but they are very minor compared to the benefit of being able to use all the languages in one IDE.
I think VSCode works like that too, but you'll need to install a lot more plugins to reach near-feature-parity with IntelliJ.
However, it is a catch-22. As more things want to become frameworks and wrap the entire process (for ease of use), there’s more monolithic stacks created, and it ends up with making it even more inaccessible without 1-click/command solutions.
By contrast, PHP has actually evolved quite gracefully over the last decade, incorporating more and more desired features into the baseline language. Sadly it has no browser clientside option.
Javascript is a victim of its own rapid success :(