The new Cloud9 development environment | Hacker News Reader

The new Cloud9 development environment

blog.c9.io

190 pointsivarpruijn73 comments

Still no word on the OSS part. Last commit on master was November last year.

I like it as a service for my personal use and OSS work. But employers will mostly not allow me to use a hosted service to edit their code; I've tried.

Open source is still very important to us. We will release an open source offering to github soon.

And the Open Source distribution of Cloud9 has always been a complete nightmare to install (in my experience). It's always felt like the OSS part was for show ("hey, use our cloud service - it's also (sort of) OSS").

That's exactly why we're spending the extra time to polish our open source release to make it really easy to install, fully documented, etc.

Will you also include support for Docker containers?

Would love to use Cloud9, but as previous poster - the company won't allow it.

Also, will you keep it updated this time?

To be fair, the ACE editor has been quite the opposite. Well documented and well supported (on their Google Group, nightwing is VERY responsive).

This has definitely been my favorite cloud IDE so far. I wonder if they're going to add any of this stuff to the open source component? Last commit was on Nov. 4, 2013, so I hope they haven't stopped that part of it. (https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9)

The new version is based on a completely new code base. We have a new core and eventually ported and rewrote most of the old plugins one by one. We're working on the APIs and documentation right now and want to bring the new version to github again pretty soon.

Awesome to hear! Looking forward to checking it out. Are you guys still using Architect? I love that module but I always felt it had a lot more potential -- wasn't sure if there were plans to enhance it at all.

Yes we use architect. It is at the core of Cloud9. We use it specifically client side. Our updates will find it's way back to the OSS repo soon.

Also note that all of our work on Ace was done directly on the open source repository <http://github.com/ajaxorg/ace>.

An update open source version of the IDE will follow soon.

Any idea how soon? Otherwise, how about your best guess on the probable order of magnitude that the estimate will be? (days, weeks, months?)

weeks

Thank you!

I find it weird that there is no mention of pricing anywhere. Even if you go to sign up and switch to "premium" it doesn't tell you how much it's going to cost you!

Edit: They have now added $19/mo on the Premium signup page.

When I click the "UPGRADE TO PREMIUM" link on my dashboard there's huge text proclaiming "$19/month".

There also doesn't seem to be any clear way to make a bulk purchase for a company instead of per individual.

I've been using Cloud9 online and Cloud9 local for a couple years now and have been using the beta of the current release for the last several months.

I use Cloud9IDE to build a Node.js powered website, a use-case to which this environment is particularly well adapted. I do not need to jump through any hoops to get interactive debugging of running node.js processes (even supports some hot code updating).

The tool serves me particularly well as someone who works from several computers and loves being able to pick up exactly where I left off without being tied to a physical computer.

PS: http://plnkr.co is 100% built in C9. I'm a fan, but not at all affiliated with ajaxorg.

I've had good luck on Nitrous.io, even to the point that I'd seriously consider getting a Chromebook instead of a MacBook to do dev on.

None of these systems truly replicates the experience and flow of using VIM for me, but Nitrous seemed like the one that got closest for me to a really solid dev environment/ide on the web with minimum hassle.

I haven't used Cloud 9 in a long time, so maybe this update makes it better.

I'm a user of both Nitrous and c9.

What I love about Nitrous.io is the speed of their console and the power that seems to be allocated to each box.

What I really don't like is the editor component that they use which likes to interfere with my coding style. When I ask it to indent certain lines it seems to take that as a license to make its own decisions as to what the appropriate tab stop should be.

Recent versions of CodeMirror have improved this a lot, but I remain a much bigger fan of the ACE (http://ace.c9.io/#nav=about) editor component used by (and open-sourced) the c9 team.

You should check out the zed editor. Its something you can run locally (stand-alone or chrome app) and has a remote code component.

I've used these cloud IDEs, but haven't like any of the text editors they supply. Zed is amazing compliment to these services.

http://zedapp.org/features/edit-remote-files/

Big fan of Zef's work though I haven't tried Zed yet. Another really cool tool is TEdit by Tim Caswell.

But before I toot their horns too loud, they are sort of competitors of mine as the creator of Plunker. Anyway, the more the merrier as long as well all get along and move the experience forward!

Funny thing that both Zef and Tim are former Cloud9 employees. They largely build upon the same stack with VFS[0] and Ace.

[0] https://github.com/c9/vfs

Neither of us use VFS, but indeed we do use Ace -- it's awesome.

Yep, Zed is very nice, And it uses Ace editor component developed by Cloud9.

Check out the minimal mode that Cloud9 provides in the preferences/welcome screen. It makes Cloud9 look like an Ace editor without any of the cruft.

I find myself thinking the same thing about every web based IDE/editor - how would you write a graphical application? How would you write a game? I guess its possible to install X on the remote and then somehow stream video over the wire but that seems like a chunky experience.

I guess that's the difference between these and traditional solutions, in a web based IDE you can only write text based applications.

Cloud9 actually offers SSH workspaces. (Not sure this new version has them too)

So you can use the cloud9 IDE on your local files or on files that are on a server of yours.

The new version absolutely has SSH workspaces. You can SSH into your own machine or get an SSH box from e.g. digitalocean.com and use that with Cloud9 if you like.

The bit that gets me is that I have as shonky and relatively unreliable internet connection and work from home. This is not an issue when my toolchain sits locally.

I really couldn't risk using an entirely online service for direct productivity.

I think web based IDEs are mainly intended for web and server applications. In this situation a game or graphical application would be written in HTML/JS and served to another browser tab.

As a student who moves between boxes a lot I've found this very useful.

A while ago I wanted to work on a GTK app on cloud 9. With a little work, I was able run a vnc server and install a websockets-based vnc viewer on their infrastructure. It allowed me to view the GTK app in my browser.

Talk about working backwards.

I've been playing today with the new version, loaded in a project i have been using in Nitrous.io and have been really happy with c9 so far.

The only complaint i have after 3-4 hours of ruby dev was performance when it appears i’m doing anything IO related on my container. For example re-seeding the test database, or even startup times of the test rails container.

For example right now here is a screenshot of the terminal: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w8b29sn8fjabbr3/Screenshot%202014-...

(56 load average? Swap almost full? Yikes)

That said, the features are solid and i was able to get up and running very quickly. Assuming the are just having some growing pains from launching the new services today, I’m definitely going to consider switching over to c9.

I haven’t checked the forums to see if there is a way to re-launch my project onto a different server to try and get better performance.

As you can imagine we're getting a big load of traffic on release day. Which is fine; we have many servers hosting these containers. Some new ones are being spawned as the traffic increases. What we're finding now, though, is that we need to tune our load balancing logic, especially for the scenario where many new users show up. This requires the use of some other metrics than the "normal" scenario with many users leaving their workspace for several hours and then coming back. Right now there is one host in particular that has more users on it than it reasonably should. But, in short, we're working on making it better :)

Yeah, looking at the behavior of the machine I figured something like this was going on. It doesn't help either you ops team either having made front page on HN =)

That said, poking around I realized I can create and edit projects on my own server. I just spun up a 2G droplet on digital ocean and was playing around with the SSH connector and i am beyond impressed. Ideally I'd prefer to manage my own system resources, but being able to drop in and work on my project from any browser on hardware that I can control, upgrade and allocate is very nice and feels more sustainable at least for my case.

Not to be confused with the Cloud9 esports team: http://cloud9.gg

It really is confusing. Even more than Rust lang vs Rust game.

True story: I initially thought Cloud9 (the esports team) was sponsored by Cloud9 (the development environment). They've even both got blue cloud logos!

Maybe they should think about cutting a deal, if their thing with HyperX isn't too exclusive?

Hey, there is more of us...

Reminds me of Clang, the C compiler, vs Clang, the really interesting tech demo/game for sword fighting ;)

The direct link to the complete article is: https://c9.io/site/blog/2014/07/announcing-the-all-new-cloud...

Definitely going to be giving cloud9 another shot in the coming days. I spend a fair amount of time (and actually pay for a small slot) on Nitrous.io's PaaS, which I really like. The part about Nitrous.io that really, really, really sucks is the lack of root - you have to install everything (mostly) through "Smart Packages" which is basically just a wrapper around the install I guess, and requires you to build it. Any project with any real dependencies quickly becomes a pain. Some of the newer services (like terminal.com) actually DO give you root, which I'm assuming is OK because it's running on top of Docker? Either way, a nice front-end + root is awesome and I'll be giving it a shot.

On the new Cloud9 version you have full root access. We are now providing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a Docker container. Feel free to install whatever you want.

Last time I read about Docker and root it was not a good combination. Afaik Docker is not secure (yet).

I hope you take extra precautions to secure Docker containers from each other.

For those interested, Daniel Walsh gave a good overview of the biggest issues at dockercon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWGFqMuEHdw

I will give them a try. I occasionally use the free tier at nitrous.io, and more frequently use a paid subscription to the Haskell web based IDE at fpcomplete.com. That said, for my main Haskell project (demo at http://haskell.knowledgebooks.com) I find local development using emacs to be more agile.

I saw the real benefits of a web based IDE when I worked at Google last year. They have an awesome chrome web based IDE that integrates really well with their codebase and source code management systems. I would expect other very large tech companies to go in the same direction of a customized development system.

I noticed that when using ghostery you can't do anything; clicking login doesn't do anything, neither does clicking sign up.

Disconnect, too.

As soon as I saw this it reminded me of the darknetmarket on tor with the same name! Looks like they have a similar logo too http://bviaqyj6obc54vhn.onion

I checked it out and it looks pretty sweet. But is there a way to get syntax highlighting for the Slim templating language that I'm not seeing? I use Slim extensively. No Slim, no Cloud9 for me.

There's syntax highlighting for over 110 languages (TextMate/Sublime Text.tm language files can be imported), but if yours is not included, the Ace editor we use is Open Source, so you can build your own highlighter (see http://ace.c9.io/#nav=higlighter) or submit a request to build it: https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues?labels=mode-request&pa...

Is this in any way related to http://cloud9.gg/, the esports organization?

If not, things might get a tad awkward.

The Cloud9 IDE has been around for quite a while.

I thought this was going to be Cloud9 from bell labs..

And I thought it was about cloud9.gg at first glance.

The bell labs project was plan9 not cloud9 https://www.google.com/search?q=plan9+from+bell+labs

I thought it was a really weird direction for the Cloud9 gaming team to take.

So. Do they only offer this 19$/month subscription? That's all? Can you even make it an annual payment to save a bit or something?

Some time in the not so distant future we'll think that it was silly that in 2014 the majority of development was done locally.

I love that we've gotten to the point where a lot of things in web development have become genuinely convenient and easy, but there is still so much in store for us.

Anyone compare this to XDK yet?

http://xdk-software.intel.com/

Several years ago, C9 announced App Engine support. Does it support it now?

The deploy panel is disabled for now. It will come back soon, better than you can imagine :)

Very happy to read this!

login with github redirect to github for authorization and then does not work. No error message, just nothing. Click on login and you stay on the page.

Same problem here. It's actually doing the auth correctly, it seems, because I then went to the main home page again and it showed me as logged in, and I could get to my dashboard from there.

Didn't went that far, simply revoked access on my gh account.

I probably would have done the same if I hadn't already used it in the past. But it's worth checking out again. I tweeted support to let them know.

Ops, that was a mistake on our end, just fixed for everyone. Sorry!

Seems like they removed the "zen mode".

They actually caught up to Koding.

Still no iPad or touch support?

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