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Web-based IDEs Edge Closer To the Mainstream
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Feb 19, 2009 10:04 AM
from the hope-your-connection-is-reliable dept.
from the hope-your-connection-is-reliable dept.
snitch writes "Last week Mozilla released Bespin, their web-based framework for code editing, and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of the web-based Eclipse workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like Heroku, a web-based IDE and hosting environment for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream."
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Submission: Web-based IDEs to become mainstream? by Anonymous Coward
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Soil cleaner (Score:5, Funny)
I had this great idea for a product. It would clean the soil in your yard. The soil itself would be clean soil after using the product. In other words, even if you rolled around in it and got the soil all over you, you would still be clean.
Strangely, it was a solution to a problem that no one had. It figures that I shouldn't get my product ideas from Bill & Ted
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I can imagine the EULA now:
"ALL YOUR CODE-BASES BELONG TO US!111!"
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm wondering how they would word their EULA. If they claim ownership of the code that's compiled and developed on their servers, that would be a deal breaker for most developers.
Otherwise its a wonderfully implemented idea.
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For precisely this reason, I would never ever switch to a remote IDE hosted by another company.
A possibly debatable secondary reason is just that I don't want anyone else having access to my code that is potentially going to be released as closed source. Everyone knows IT guys are generally snoopy when they're bored, and sometimes my comments contain profanities directed towards my users.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Measures to cut costs as you suggested, this being outsourcing of non-essential business or using third party solutions usually do not work unless they are done with brains and as that pretty much never happens they do not provide real savings. Spreadshit boys have their field day: once when they get bonuses for saving plan and another time when they have to fix what they messed up while doing it. As long as products still work all is well of course.
Do not misunderstand me - I am not against such measures b
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been my experience as well. At my former company, we had our own somewhat expensive IT and support crew but everything worked really well. Someone decided to save money by switching to Unisys for help desk support.
Direct support costs went down, but whatever they saved on IT staff we lost 100 times over on lost productivity from help desk tickets being 'resolved' before actual issues and it was a aweful. I have since left the company, but up to the day I left management was still happy using Unisys
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Focus on the business at hand (e.g. coding) and quit wasting time on infrastructure (version control, defect tracking, build systems, backup & recovery, server sizing, etc...).
In the past 2 years, I have spent 3490 hours on the "business at hand" (e.g. coding, documentation, meetings, etc.), 10 hours on infrastructure (setup and maintenance of trac, svn, backups, VPN) and 500 hours on lunch. It's a small company, I'm a programmer and the nominal back-end sys-admin.
We easily spend more time configuring people's POP & SMTP settings on their e-mail than we do on our trac and svn servers, which are used daily by 75% of the company.
The real infrastructure inefficiency happe
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is rather off-topic, but Sumo-Paint [www.sumo.fi] still impresses me, it's not quite as good as Photoshop, etc, but it comes very close...
If Bespin, etc can get anywhere near that functionality/power... it will certainly be useful. Especially in classroom situations, where it can be sandboxed in the browser.
However, I am curious about how one would go about compiling, or is it strictly code-editing, online-only apps?
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You'd be simply astounded at how many people do not have laptops! /sarcasm
The 'point' isn't to be used as a full time dedicated anything, it's simply (in the meantime) for those "damnit, wish I had something installed that could do this" moments, however, "in the future" there will be an even greater desire for web-based applications, with the 15 devices people have, all being able to access their one home server, being able to run your favorite app *as you like it* from anywhere, on any machine with intern
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a Sage [sagemath.org] developer, and our only GUI is a web interface. Run Sage on your local machine, and you serve to localhost. As Sage developers use the GUI, we're getting more attached to it, and we keep adding more IDE-like features. Recently, there have been discussions to make it easier to edit Sage directly from the GUI. With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of th
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It also sounds to me like something that would be *really neat* to include in a source code control product for teams. [...]
The one does not have anything to do with the other. One provides a managed place for you to put your code, the other lets you write code in a comfortable unified environment. Why would you want to integrate those two?
(Assuming just for a moment that web-based IDEs actually make sense for professional software development.)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
The one does not have anything to do with the other. One provides a managed place for you to put your code, the other lets you write code in a comfortable unified environment. Why would you want to integrate those two?
When working in a team environment, integrating the two makes for another channel of communication, especially between geographically separated team members (which seems to be an increasing trend in my personal contracts; I've gone from originally working in a company where source code control was done by shouting over the cubicle walls, to a situation where I'm getting up 3 hours earlier than normal to collaborate with coders in European time zones). It also seems to me to greatly simplify the autosave process if the two were integrated, especially in a web environment- thus capturing all branches of the code automatically server-side, for the project manager to integrate the final code for build.
Of course, this all would require at least two major advancements to the current codesets in TFA:
1. enough speed for professional software development (something that even current client-side IDEs sometimes lack for me, though the problem might be more of a PEBCAK, or more precisely, a PEBBAF (Problem exists between brain and fingers, instead of between Chair and Keyboard).
2. sufficient integration between the data entered in the client-side web interface and the code repository to show changes when two team members are working on the same source code file.
Parent
Potential for Netbooks (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not too keen on someone else's server being the host for my web based IDE and holding my code but if they could make it so you could attach to any server (including one from your home) I would be all over this.
I know it sounds like I'm just coming full circle and mimicking mainframes from the 80s with the ability to cool and keep a quad core beast at home with a terabyte of storage mirrored across two drives while keeping a nice cool easy to move netbook
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If you are a vi kinda developer then what's the difference between using a versioning system (having the desktop as a SVN/Git server) ?
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Re:Potential for Netbooks (Score:5, Informative)
Setup ssh on your beefy box. Install eclipse. run xhost +
Now on your netbook ssh -x
login
eclipse&
It should popup on you netbook but be running on your beefy computer.
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Re:Potential for Netbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Potential for Netbooks (Score:4, Informative)
there is no need to xhost + your machine. It is the point of using ssh Xforwarding.
An other version would be to run your IDE from your netbook but alias make to "ssh make" or using a well configured distcc. The last point would be transfering datas. Two options are available here. Either you rsync them to the server, or you mount the code directory on your local machine using ssh, fuse and sshfs
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Mounting via NFS or SMB is generally dog slow and not recommended. Using an intelligent IDE like Eclipse that wants to parse and index all your source code, and trying to do that on a mounted dr
Re:Potential for Netbooks (Score:4, Informative)
Avoid the "xhost +" stuff. From the netbook try something like
ssh -YtC user@beefy.box.com /path/to/eclipse
and you just might get what you're looking for.
- doug
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Eh, running eclipse over ssh sounds like pain, but I was going to suggest ssh too. But I would probably suggest using vim or emacs instead of eclipse over ssh, because the bandwidth used from running eclipse might be horrid.
Yeah, just tried it on one of the campus servers. Took 5 minutes to start up, and another minute before the screen was actually painted. UI is unresponsive, menus wouldn't draw for another minute, and basically everything has about a 30 second delay. But it would probably work great over
I'm skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to remain skeptical.
Net apps are great, but their performance in many areas is unavoidably way below that of native apps. When you can do everything with JS, you can be reasonably speedy if the processing requirements aren't huge and your browser doesn't leak memory too badly. (Dammit, Firefox!)
But when you need to persist data, you have to spawn an ajax query and that 1/10 to 1/4 second (even over a fast network connection) just isn't comparable from the user perspective to hitting a local HD. As local mass storage switches from HD to solid-state over the next couple of years, the difference between native and web apps is going to increase, not decrease.
Besides, half of these things are going to be ad-supported, right? At least in my experience, the performance of most websites has decreased the last 3 years or so as they hit and increasing number of different servers. It's typical for a single page to load content, ads, local javascript, stylesheets, and analytics from 10 or more pages. Each of these connections triggers its own DNS query. Every connection and every DNS lookup has a %age chance of hanging for a few seconds due to network traffic, server load, or what have you - as a result almost 10% of web pages I try to load these days stall for a few seconds. Do you really want that kind of crap going on in the background while you're developing? I don't.
Hah! Just reminded of a most annoying example! Slashdot, for me, loads pretty much instantly. But every time I post and click that "preview" button, there's a five-second wait before the preview actually shows up. That'll be fun, and additional five seconds for every classfile save in my IDE...
Parent
Project files? Now we hide the source files! (Score:2)
Isn't using Eclipse without the editor kind of pointless?
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I'm quite convinced someone sufficiently motivated could replicate the Eclipse IDE in ASCII format and functionality in emacs.
Anyone?
Bueller?
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You *had* to ask, didn't you?
http://robrohan.com/projects/9ne/ [robrohan.com]
And just to keep the vi vs. emacs rivalry well fueled:
http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/ [internetconnection.net]
Is this just muscle-flexing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. . . I think it is an amazing technical feat, but is it really practical to require internet access for this?
I think it is time that we as a community get behind a project that allows these remote apps to be cached locally for fully disconnected use (with a desktop runtime -- something akin to Adobe Air). It would be great to visit the site once and thereafter run it local (and get updates later while connected). As long as I'm fantasizing, I think we should try to make this a standard for new desktop apps -- written like gadgets, but full blown apps.
What do you think? Are there projects out there that are working on this already?
Re:Is this just muscle-flexing? (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much what you asked for. OSS, available for a large number of platforms, and already seeing some real world use.
Parent
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What do you think?
I think that I do not need web based applications. They are slow and do not do what I want them to do. It entraps you into a given view of your data without getting fine control on it. Can you search your mail on gmail for one containing an URL that matches a given list from a webcalendar ? No you can not, because you have no raw access on the data.
I only use web based applications as a remote access when I am using a windows machine (Otherwise, I can use ssh and X11 forwarding and everything is fine).
I doubt it (Score:2)
It will either be a shit load of network communication (which will be slow).
Or a lot of client side caching and processing (heavy on memory).
IDEs need to be fast and responsive, a slow start is acceptable. You don't want to wait seconds for files to open, or even for code completion (and other nice gimmicks) to kick in.
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If you got a netbook, or lightweight laptop, and need to work on a file for a huge code project, this would be much, much faster. Even if there is a bit of lag in the UI. Your server (or server farm) you connect to is just about guaranteed to have faster processors, more ram, and larger disks.
Have you ever used the google apps? They are actually very quick and responsive, and work in a similar way.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever used the google apps? They are actually very quick and responsive, and work in a similar way.
Just my anecdotal experience, but I spend most of my day in Google Docs spreadsheets that I think it is fair to call small (8 columns by somwhere between 20 and 100 rows). At any given time, there are zero to 3 people collaborating on the same document as me. It is slow as shit. I just sorted a 25 row column (just a simple A to Z sort), there was almost 5 seconds in between choosing the GUI function and seeing the result. It even lags when typing in a cell sometimes. I couldn't imagine doing development wor
Another thing in the cloud? (Score:2)
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Do you think that's air you're breathing?
Hhmmm.
Offline coding??? (Score:3, Insightful)
mainframe solutions, mainframe problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
As people romance the scale and stability of the mainframe and move towards centralized, mainframe approaches, they forget the reasons that gave birth to the PC revolution to begin with.
Having your stuff on your computer is an immensely liberating act. No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
On the other hand, with a PC, particularly as applications move towards more open file designs, you get much more control, more choice, and as much power as you would like to invest in.
Partial Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see
As a user you get:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
universal access
If the Internet fsking worked the way it was supposed to, I wouldn't need some other server; my own machine would be a first-class citizen, and so long as I could remember its IP address I could SSH in.
I used to do just this. I was at a university which had a very nice, rather open network, and I could access my machine from anywhere in the world. Why bother even carrying a laptop around when you can x-forward your machine to any of a thousand terminals scattered around campus? But these days I'm at anot
I can see it... (Score:3, Funny)
... 2012 will be the year of the in-game web-based IDE...
The Singularity is Coming! (Score:3, Funny)
Emacs started out as an editor and now does everything (including browse the web); Mozilla (well, Firefox) started out as a web browser and soon will be able to do everything (including edit code).
But I'll stick to using lynx and cat + ed. ;)
Notepad (Score:4, Funny)
I have stopped using my local Notepad. I use a web based Notepad these days.
It totally rocks.
Planning to try a web based browser next so that I can uninstall Firefox from my machine.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Codepress is just an editor. A potentially important piece of any IDE to be sure, but only a piece. You still need file system integration, project control, build support, deployment options, UI editors, code suggestion dropdowns, and a host of other tools and features that make modern IDEs useful products.
Re:Web-based Visual Studio for MFC (Score:5, Interesting)
I do believe you've been had. His comment about Win32 strikes me as the intended 'tell' for his sarcasm. The point being that developing desktop applications in a web-based IDE doesn't make much sense. Which I do agree with. The two environments are not at all integrated.
Of course, the AC conveniently ignores the massive business of web development which *could* benefit from centralized IDE services.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I figured as much, but the prospect was too tempting to ignore...
I don't see why "real" applications couldn't be developed though, albeit they would have to be very limited in their imports and what-not, as well as almost mandatory open-source, and could be compiled on the host server, then spit out the executable back through the browser.
Although handling security would be a nightmare I would imagine, plus it would have to have an amazing code-analysis to make sure there was no infinite-loops, security-byp
Re:Web-based Visual Studio for MFC (Score:4, Insightful)
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Idiot Dumbass Editor.
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AKA, a slashdot editor?
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Does "Web-based Integrated Drive Electronics" make sense?
No, which is why I investigated further. Had they spelled it out I would have known that it held no interest to me.
I'm a coffee addict and it's early; my old brain needs to warm up before it functions properly.
We also threw glowing discs at the MCP right up until management put a stop to our shenanigans
Coincidentally I just watched TRON two days ago. It's still a good movie, and somehow even after almost thirty years it's still not outdated.
Re:But... but... (Score:5, Funny)
Real programmers use butterflies.
Parent