A web-based IDE for Javascript, HTML, and CSS | Hacker News Reader

A web-based IDE for Javascript, HTML, and CSS

codio.com

67 pointscaruana67 comments

while this does look nice am I the only one that would really rather see IDE as desktop applications instead of web apps? Why do you want me to log in? Why do I need to have an account? I don't want this. I want to download this and be able to edit what I want without being tied to you. I don't want my code to be shared with you, I want it on my file system.

Serious question, what are the points in favour of having IDEs as web apps instead of standalones?

A simple way to do web development on a Chromebook.

Also, scroll down their page to see their pitch.

I prefer offline IDEs, but I do like the idea of having access to a powerful IDE on any device with a browser. There's loads of times when I am travelling, on a train for example, where I would love to be able to dev during the time, but don't want the hassle of taking my primary workstation with me. With an online IDE like this, I can take a tablet.

I'm not particularly familiar with this application but I do see some benefits of a cloud IDE.

They will enable someone to code anywhere on any computer on any OS without installation and without having to spend time on source control. This means my Chromebook can be productive and maybe even IOS android with a keyboard.

I can give you, and anyone that said chromebook, a point but how many people do actually use tablets / mobile devices to do some actual developing? Everyone would love and we can already, just nobody does it because it's not comfortable and we all know that to write something decent you need to be comfortable.

On the anywhere part, it's a very similar situation, I feel like source control it's better because in the end you don't want your code to end up on any possible computer and you have more control of what you can do.

Sales and of tablets and phones are growing massively while sales of PCs are dropping... if this trend continues, wouldn't most people be developing using tablets and other touch devices?

The phone industry caught the PC industry because they were not innovating anymore, its was just about how to make more profits by reusing the same infastructure and just iterating enough so people would buy the "new things" - see Intel.

Now its only a matter of the PC industry learn with this punch in the stomach, and really innovate; once it does it; its back on track again..

Intel board copying Arduino for instance, is showing they are learning..

Also, imagine when they start to create something like Raspberry PI but with movable parts.. where people could change its small pieces with something to give it different functionality according to the pieces used... Even if the big ones from the industry do not see that, some small player will do it.. and the PC industry are restarted with a fresh cool air

You're looking at it wrong, it's not that they're going to use a TABLET/Phone instead of, but part of the workflow. Maybe for a quick bug fix here and there. What about if that laptop you had to haul home for occasional work was just your phone that you plugged into a monitor that had secured access to your corporate VPN where you logged into your dev environment to fix a bug that's hanging up Operations from releasing a new version?

From looking at Codenvy's logs, about 3,000 of our recurring users access the system using a chromebook or tablet. It's only single digit % overall, but it's a number that is larger than we would have thought it would be.

ChromeOS created a problem that we dont have in the first place; the users have no control of the assets on its own machine.. or at least, have a very limited access to it..

For phones its understandable, they need to be small, so storage space have to go.. but for notebooks, it doesnt make it favorable to the user; its only for the cloud computing religion sake, and to force people to put everything in the could so they can control your life..

Chromebooks/Browserbooks are traps.. we are better with PCS and normal notebooks.. and trying to replace them with this cloud-trap notebook its just silly

So, getting back to the point; You only think the cloud version of this IDE a good thing, because of the chromebook limitations. Limitations it doesnt need to have in the first place.. only for the sake of the corporation behind it, and not for the user..

And this trend was started with the loved-all-around Steve Jobs.. everybody are following.. and if this trend catch on.. we will start to see more and more.. corporation cults.. like new religions; cause our lives will become so dependent on them we are doomed..

I don't have a Chromebook yet, but if I do get one, I'll probably use crouton and put Ubuntu on it and use that as the main operating system (which is what I do on my PC laptop anyway). That gets you out of this walled garden.

You might think we're better controlling these assets on your own machine, but I have endless stories of friends and family loosing files, deleting stuff, failed backups, etc.

There are many people who don't care about the asset being on a machine vs their phone. They just want the asset wherever they are. This is why there's so many successful cloud-based services like DropBox and Evernote.

Why is source code any different? (Not asking about corporate privacy/trade-secrets here, just the concept of a code file as text being shared to all your devices and thought of as an asset you always have access to).

I'm of the opinion that the sooner I can throw away the device I'm using today, and pickup my work with the next device, the better we are. Using my desktop computer here at work. Tablet on the train, etc... and then I want a new Tablet? Boom, just log into my IDE and I can continue coding ASAP. Just like logging in to email.

This wave is coming. Right now big enterprises have virtualized their dev environments into secure environemnts that you can only access via RDP. The next phase for them is offering only secured source-coded private-cloud based editing solution.

Just want to make it clear, that im not against cloud storage, like dropbox; or with google, MS, Apple or anybody else behind it..

What we need its that cloud-storage and backup be a optional solution. Im against cloud storage as a obligatory condition of the digital life.. and the trendy-push for to everything-in-the-cloud movement..

Because this leads to lock-in and really fucked-up concepts of property (like the Bruce Willis case against Apple being unable to leave the tunes he bought to his daughters)

So, cloud-storage? Yes.. but only as an option; otherwise you're locked (and welcome to the neo-feudalism)

You are not the only one. "The cloud" is neat, but not for everything. It also has privacy problems as we all know.

One advantage to web-based code editors is that you have it everywhere you have an internet connection. There's a problem with that too though; you need an internet connection.

Offline coding with Codio coming Q1 next year. Also, if you use Github, even private repos, everyone is one password away from your code.

(Freddy May from Codio)

I see web-based IDEs as potentially becoming a big thing in corporate enterprise world. I've worked in environments where we RDP into a secured secondary environment and had to edit code there. I see a browser-based IDE the next phase of something like that. Of course, you'd have to be able to set up this web-ide in a private corp environment.

But this is a good start for the indy web-developer working on certain types of projects.

One of the scenarios they lay out on their site is students. I can see classes of students using this site to develop and share.

My first thought was, we already have this it's called JSFiddle. If I want to just screw around or play with a simple idea I can go to JSFiddle without signing up and just play.

That said, I think that the execution is really nice and I hope that they find a market.

This kind of thing is exactly what I need for my students. It's so much easier using web-based products where I don't have issues with the network at work or students installing software at home. I currently use Mozilla Thimble quite a lot, and the more IDEs of this type we get, the better they'll all become.

I am the founder of Codenvy, a type of Web IDE that is more focused on enterprise apps. We have found that the value of cloud workspaces has been around instant access and centralized control (for groups of workspaces). So, it is possible to offer on-demand, temporary workspaces without login (some vendors provide that including Codenvy). It tends to be a vendor choice as to whether requiring authentication before gaining project access is important. Most vendors do require authentication as it allows for saving important properties, user configurations, and some security settings.

To see some of the use cases around why cloud IDEs are used over desktop IDEs, we have listed them on our site. https://codenvy.com/why/cloud-ide/. The early uses have been around scenarios where configuration / setup of desktop are burdensome: pair programming, hackathons, training events, or partner integrations. We have some demos with Google, Intuit, and WSO2 that show what IDE on demand might be like, but those are special case scenarios.

As for the concept of downloading the IDE itself. Some cloud vendors do offer offline mode, and packaged chrome apps which do give that very behavior. It's first inning sort of stuff, but it will be possible in the future to allow offline sync of the development experience. Some cloud providers offer both build / debugger runtimes, so downloading offline, means also having a way to synchronize the project's files, and the underlying infrastructure necessary to execute the code. In a pure Web app sense, where it's HTML / CSS / JavaScript, this is fairly easy. But if you need to have synchronized access to dependencies, libraries, or runtimes, then the challenges are more pronounced.

Thanks for the cool questions.

I do imagine many people feel like the previous commenter, myself included. For cloud development many of us use vim for browser based stuff like this I love jsfiddle. I really felt it would have been beneficial to just let me see and use the product without signing up. The product is very niche and serves a very specific purpose. The reality is if I really liked the product and had intentions of using it I would have created an account. I saw the sign up page and left.

Just had a look at that Codeenvy page, it said,

"Developers Spend 13 Hours/Week Administering Their Desktop.".

That seems like an awful lot, 2 days a week on "administering"? Is this real data from desktop IDE users, if so then this is clearly a huge problem. What kind of things are people spending the 13 hours on each week that is saved by moving to a Cloud IDE?

I could see overhead if developers were constantly swapping from project to project to fix bugs and each of those projects had different set ups in terms of where the source code was stored, how it was configured etc.

I can't speak for other companies/languages/setups but using one of Eclipse/Netbeans for Java with Maven and SVN/Git is pretty low overhead in terms of configuration for me. For PHP we use SVN, SublimeText and pre-defined build and deploy scripts, which also do not have many pain points.

Genuine question: where is the 13 hours spent each week?

It was a study done by 1200 engineers on LinkedIn and Electric Cloud. I think it was February 2013 when the results came out.

This does have a tendency to happen in various degrees in larger enterprise environments where configuration problems of the IDE and the systems you are building become costly to maintain. The way we think about it is that organizations have invested in DevOps technologies to automate the entire release process post-commit of the code. But that once the changes make their way out into complex staging / production environments, there are config + code changes that do not synchronize cleanly back into the developer's workspace. So, as the number of commits increases, and the size of the team increases, there are many more synchronizations that need to occur to keep development systems ready for the coders.

So the time suck shows up in mysterious ways: 1) Maintenance of the IDE install, especially with Eclipse which has had plug-in versioning & interoperability challenges at times.

2) Synchronizing configurations across teams, commits, and machines.

3) Collaborative / human costs, from the time spent in having large teams figure out the best way to operate & use their development workbenches consistently.

4) The environment problem, which is partly due to the production environment configuration is not exactly identical to what can be run on the desktop, so managing that in an automated way poses time issues.

For me, as someone who has a "day job" and some side projects, it allows me to have access to the codebase easily, without having to download it to my work machine or use nano from ssh.

>Serious question, what are the points in favour of having IDEs as web apps instead of standalones?

The only point in favour is that it runs on crippled operating systems like ChromeOS.

Google wants us all running Compiler-As-A-Service, Editor-As-A-Service and Debugger-As-A-Service webapps that have Google Analytics and Google Adsense running on them. So they created a crippled OS that can't run Free and Open native apps leaving the users with no choice but to use closed proprietary software services running on some other machine that they don't control

Software as a service is the least free kind of software. We should be fighting hard against it. This is an even more serious fight than the fight against local proprietary software (at least in that fight we still had control of our own data and weren't forced to upgrade to new versions).

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.comp...

The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

We need to stop building these traps. If you find yourself using cloud services, think again and consider if there is native software that you could use instead that will run on machines that you control giving you full control over the data and the code.

Right on. Reminds me that I really want to set up ARK OS or something for my family so we don't have to rely on Google so much. Cloud services are fine and dandy, so long as I own them.

I see many valid points in your argument but at the same time I find myself more and more wanting to offload the responsibility of maintaining my tools to a 3rd party. The more online/subscription services I use the happier I am because I don't have to spend time installing and upgrading tools, archiving content, etc.

Some content I don't want to own (music, books, etc), some cloud services are open source (so they can live well beyond their creators) and some other services combine local and remote access (eg. github). As much as I want full control, I also want options.

This seems like the opposite of options. (Not that it doesn't seem like a pretty nice tool -- if for nothing else than jsfiddle on steroids.)

Thanks for your comment, but just a quick note on comparisons to jsFiddle and the like...

Tools such as JsFiddle, CodePen, etc. are extremely limited by design. They are intended to simply demo and showcase HTML, Javascript and CSS. Codio is a fully-fledged IDE and code editor, and does a lot more. Take a look at our homepage and you'll why.

So while we can do what JsFiddle and co. can, and would be delighted if you used it for that purpose, our main goal is to get you guys to use Codio as your IDE of choice.

I love the concept of the web-based tool. It's really not a lot different than SSHing into your own server, except a better ui (Much like using Gmail instead of Pine to read email).

These types of developer tools will makes it easy for me to move between OSes and even types of devices. These types of tools will eventually allow us to work from out Tablet (maybe for a quick 20 minute editing session after dinner because you just came up with an idea how to do something) , Phone (quick a fix type/spelling error while waiting for the train), desktop (your routine daily development).... all from the same setup. This is the future I look forward to.

Granted: this type of stuff won't fly for corporate/enterprise work for a long time....

Yeah but they are limiting the ways in which you can use your tools. It sounds like what you really want is just a way to persist your tools & files between OS installations & dead laptops...

Imagine having a build script that initialized all your software licenses, and that the tools all auto-upgraded in the background. Isn't that way better? I think this is kindof the GNU Tools & apt-get dream.

I'm sure the lines between software & cloudware will blur, so shouldn't the goal should just be freedom & control. Offloading tools (as the above poster mentions) is, I agree, just a scam to get you to pay... It's like paying for iTunes just to have it auto-update without asking for your permission. And if you hate the new version, sucks for you because using a new media player involves using proprietary tools to transfer your data & account, rather than just installing a new player & pointing to the same media folder.

You can easily run client-side only web apps. It's not Google's fault that developers would rather serve up code from their server.

Check out this editor: http://www.mrdoob.com/projects/htmleditor/ https://github.com/mrdoob/htmleditor

Runs entirely client-side, you can download the files, open in a browser, and voilà, full functionality.

Apps like this are the promise of the web, of OSes like Firefox OS and Chrome OS. It's only developer imposed limitations that are to blame, much like online-only DRM in native apps...

I still haven't found a web-based IDE that does what I want, but here are some of the theoretical advantages I can see:

• why have a real-time browser preview in your IDE when you can have a realtime-IDE preview in every browser you want to test in?

• access your workspace with your settings from any computer (and OS)

• you could deeplink directly to lines of code in a browser and place that in documentation or tickets to make it easier for people to reference

• real-time multi-user editing could be made possible this way

• never need to update/upgrade your IDE software as the online code can be improved seamlessly and instantly for all users

• instantly make code shareable to another person

• create and manage temporary access to specific parts of code for online users

I think most of what you are reacting to has nothing to do with the technology involved in running a web-based IDE, but rather you object to the hassles involved with running a business around providing a web-based IDE.

You could build a web-based IDE that didn't require a login, but how would it save your settings or projects? You could build a web-based IDE that didn't store or access code online and only worked from your local storage too, it would just be silly for many people to go to all that effort and not have the obvious advantages of being online as well.

Perhaps a better solution than public cloud services is a class of business software built using web technology that each user operates privately.

I personally don't want to use my file system to develop applications and write code.

We're adding offline capability Q1 next year so you can work on and offline - best of both worlds.

(Freddy May from Codio)

Agreed. While conveniences are nice, so much of this cloud tech come at a huge cost. Whenever I see any reduced-feature app I immediately search for an attempt at vendor lock-in. Cloud only + required signup... yikes.

I used to code RoR & when I moved to Java my mind was blown by how advanced Eclipse's plug-in ecosystem & perspective switching is. (I know I know, you can code RoR in Eclipse...)

This looks appealing, and I understand this maybe if it becomes a complete cloud dev/deployment stack for Node & the scripting languages, but outside that I wouldn't trust configurations given by a web-app company that is trying to simplify my coding life.

AWS has a learning curve & some lock-in but people delve into that world because there is so much freedom otherwise. Cloud IDE tools are just like working from the file system of a very restricted machine. A big part of software engineering is the edge case, the freedom to use your box to engineer something really unique.

Semi-Tangent I may get ripped apart for: When I first started working for a corporation I was a little uneasy about getting into a physical server, Java-based ecosystem. But after observing awhile and realizing a lot of the possibilities that this offers, I'm relieved not to have to live & die so much by the framework culture. I think Netflix is really inspiring to this end. I'll admit I haven't dug through their code repos much but the fact that they open-source things and maintain an interesting tech blog are a testament to the fact that a lot of ingenuity is still happening in the "this is MY stack" world (vs. "we need to rethink our business model to fit a pre-defined stack/framework/toolset").

I used to love Heroku as well, but lately I've been having so many 2nd thoughts. In a world of Machine Images... why trust a company that will upcharge based on "Services" (a lot of which are just pre-configured installations of open source software) rather than charging for straight resource consumption. If it were upto me I'd kindof rather keep a sysadmin on retainer to build some better images, and then maybe open source those. Except I'm sure Amazon is way ahead of me on that.

Why does the title have "Could be interesting" in it? If it couldn't be interesting, then it shouldn't be on HN in the first place.

HN has been gradually slipping into a Reddit-like community. It's become more casual and emotional. Which I think is a bad trend, but there's not much that will stop it.

Haven't noticed that so far luckily; on Reddit people just stopped reading mostly I feel. If you are not the top comment, generally people won't read. I think people here still read all comments generally (about something they find interesting obviously that is).

HN is becoming (very) popular. HN has always been a very influencial media, despite its minimal nature,in IT.

So more people posting => less quality news maybe.

HN has something other networks dont have : the ability for users to engage with very prestigious IT people in more than 140 characters, and to get relevant feedback on a product. It would be a pity HN lose that crowd because of a few bad apples.

My hope is that you take this (rather good-looking) code, and port it to a closed-source, for profit tool based on node-webkit. Let me buy it for $100, and run it on my local machine, and not suffer the downsides and dependency inherent in the SASS model.

It looks like a nice product, but honestly, unless I control the bits (or at least have a nice illusion of controlling the bits, e.g. what I get when I use Chrome or Firefox) then I'm not interested. I'm especially not interested in a SASS that essentially holds my tooling and my code hostage, that if I don't pay the fee then my tools go away. That's just a stupid decision to get into that kind of a dependent relationship with a tool vendor. If the last few years have taught us anything its that SASS is convenient and wonderful in many ways, but has some severe, even debilitating downsides: no privacy, no control, no freedom.

There are some SASS tools that I use, but it's with increasing reluctance, and I have "plan B" ready at hand. (Although honestly I haven't looked into what it would take to export all of my Evernote data). There is no chance in hell I'd ever use a SASS IDE. It's just too important.

There's another reason why a SASS IDE will never fly, at least with me, and that's the fact that once you commit to it, you can never, ever code offline. For many people this is not a deal-breaker, but for those who place a premium on uninterrupted, undistracted coding going offline for a while is invaluable. Of course, any SASS app will not be available unless you are actively connected to the internet, so this use case is out.

I think this is going to be a necessity in a few years when web-based IDEs are functionality complete enough that enterprises can use them.

Very quick, nicely built, but honestly, after trying several web based IDE's the only thing that keeps me from sticking with them are the keyboard shortcuts. I love cmd-1,2,3, cmd-t and other shortcuts in sublime (and textmate and e-texteditor before that).

I don't think I can switch to web based editors, until these things will work seamlessly and smoothly out of the box.

Codio has keyboard shortcuts and they can all be customized. We are also adding a sublime like command bar and many other productivity focused features. We are adding a load of stuff for back-end development, too.

(Freddy May from Codio)

Sorry Freddy, I got excited and replied immediately after you. ;)

You guys responding to this so quickly makes me want to give Codio a shot.

Any thoughts on pricing before I commit?

It will be < $10 per month.

Support for Node and previewing with Node? (or Meteor?)

It's on the Roadmap ;)

Disclaimer: I'm Joel Moss, CTO of Codio

We've worked very hard on building a system that allows you to customise your keyboard shortcuts. There's still more we can and will be doing, including quick tab switching. And if you wait a few days, you'll also have a quick-open feature just like Sublime's cmd-t.

We'd love it iof you could post your feature requests on the forum http://forum.codio.com/

cheers!

Awesome stuff Joel, thank you for that, I will definitely be spending more time with Codio.

Oh that's an ugly URL.

https://codio.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=promtweet&u...

Please remove utm junk before submitting.

As a web developer, I have to say that this looks amazing! You guys did a great job building this and it looks really polished. Congratulations on launching.

On the other hand, I have to agree with many of the other commenters who say they would prefer to have their files on their file system.

Maybe you could consider integrating with the file system api for platforms that support it? Then you could have the best of both worlds.

It really looks cool, like someone already said, I really don't want to be tied to you and want things on my machine.

Looks good, but it's the soundtrack that convinced me to give it a try. An emotional response partly (the royalty-free musak behind most promos makes me want to gouge my ears), but it also suggests that at least one person at codio knows what they're doing.

It's funny how many comments we've had about the music on our video. I wasn't sure at first, but Freddy, our CEO chose it so didn't want to upset him ;)

It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with server-side coding, so unless I'm incorrect, it's yet another entry into the likes of JSFiddle, CodePen, JSBin, CSSDeck, Dabblet, Tinkerbin, Liveweave, etc.

Codio is a complete, fully functional IDE, not a Codepen clone. We also have a lot of server side stuff coming out next week and server side support is an ongoing thing, as is offline editing, which will be coming out Q1 next year. We're still in Beta so we're listening hard!

Freddy May - Codio CEO

I've been quite happy with Codemirror so far. It does all that for many more languages, and is easily extendable. (and free+open as in really free)

I too prefer the concept of codemirror, but the difference is that codemirror is just a text editor and doesn't have any file management fucntionality, so while I apprecite codemirror more, I think they are two slightly different things

Adobe Brackets... the truth is you can mashup a text editor with live reloading and collaborative programming very easily and fast with nodejs or node-webkit . I'm sure there are already such projects on github if you search for it.

Wow. Finally a web-based IDE that works well on an iPad.

Testing it out, good experience so far. Question: shouldn't the 404.html page be displayed automatically on 404?

Great, but how do I change the font?

how do they do the left side bullet points trick ? is there a js library for that ?

It's CSS3 and some simple javascript

A combination of scrollspy (jQuery version - https://github.com/sxalexander/jquery-scrollspy) and some CSS3 animation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com