Nitrous.io brings its browser-based app development environment into public beta | Hacker News Reader

Nitrous.io brings its browser-based app development environment into public beta

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I'm a huge fan of nitrous.io

Great IDE and linux ubuntu shell? YES PLEASE!

This is the future. I wish it was around when I got started programming a few years ago.

As someone from the cloud world, I love this stuff. I wish we had built this at Microsoft for Windows Azure.

dont give up, dont wish, build this for Microsoft for Windows Azure

How is Nitrous different from cloud9?

edit:

It seems Nitrous is a mix between Heroku and C9.

Help me understand. Why do I want to move my development to the cloud? I grok a Heroku competitor, but I'm really having a hard time understanding what I could possibly gain from developing in the cloud?

Easily share a development environment with your team seamlessly. _Everybody_ is on the same page from day 1. I think that's a great selling point.

Also in case you have dev-environment setup on multiple computers, it eliminates the need to keep them in sync.

Also good for hobby projects where you just want to try out a technology without spending time on setting up the environment

I really like this idea (and maybe I'm just dumb) but I really didn't get from the homepage that this was for actual deployed applications, not just a collaborative web dev environment.

In particular, I really need to know what backend services (if any) are available. Almost everything I write uses at least Postgres and Memcached, are those available? Even just a list of addons/backends would be incredibly helpful.

You're wrong this is _only_ for testing and development. NOT production applications.

Straight for the horses mouth:

https://twitter.com/NitrousIO/status/350045731442262016

Just deployed a nodejs app to nitrous.io. Coming from a heroku background, there are some quirks here and there. Wrote up a tutorial about how to deploy nodejs apps on Nitrous if you have never done anything like that before: http://songz.quora.com/Deploying-your-app-on-Nitrous-using-N...

I really dig the concept. Having seen the downsides of vagrant on a few projects, I'm definitely interested in the feasability of cloud-hosted dev environments. Virtualization on top of cloud servers could make this cheaper than running your own, and if you got clever you could probably setup shared services for SOA heavy architectures.

I just recently started using Vagrant. What downsides have you seen? Any show-stoppers?

It would be very interesting to see some sort of provisioning system built into Nitrous, much like using saltstack/chef/puppet with Vagrant.

I'm also curious about the downsides of using Vagrant.

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you have full access to the command line you can probably get your recipes working there. If this works, I understand it's not as easy as provisioning with Vagrant but it's a workaround for now.

I've been using this for a while and have really been enjoying it. Also handy being able to choose between a few geographical locations, to reduce latency which is always really bad from Australia to elsewhere.

Awesome. I'm looking to learn some nodejs, and this will spare me from getting my head wrapped around how to handle the environment.

being a big c9.io user nitrous.io does have that same look and feel...however I really dislike the credit system in my expereince anytime a company has tried to use some kind of credit system its usually never good for those devs who simply cant pay or simply dont want to...but overall love the look and feel "cant wait to start slinging some mad js"

Though like Heroku, you start out with enough 'free' to cover the base model so you don't have to pay anything.

This looks really nice. Will probably use this instead of heroku next time I need to use it.

no gofmt on save. Also seems to not pick up external changes in the editor, e.g. from vim.

Right, our text editor is pretty basic at the moment, but hey if you are a vim user, it works perfectly!

Does the collab mode work with vim?

Try tmux to collaborate in the terminal

If this could implement an inspection-view tool ala chrome inspector that actually made front-end styling changes then I'd never leave the browser.

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