Comment by anon1385 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon1385 | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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...

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.

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