It's 2009 already -- where's my damn internet-based IDE??

Somewhere in my hard-drives I've got a very length and never quite finished article on this topic.

The Online-IDE. What a thing of beauty. What a must-have. What a killer app.

And of course: What a horrible idea! What a monstrosity!

I think I started trying to write about the topic in about 2003. And I was pretty serious about it then. I started building one. Twice!

It seemed like it was only just beyond the state of the art. Sure there were challenges. But there was this thing i'd discovered called httpWebRequest... and with it's power, the Online IDE seemed inevitable.

Well, it's 2009 now and we're still stuck with these crazy desktop IDE's. But how long now, until the IDE goes online?

"Maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not the day after that. But soon, and for the rest of your life, you'll be programming online."

What do you think? Inevitable?

Here's dodgy pictures of some of those I found.

'The web 2.0 database' lists a lot of Online Development tools and there's a Big List at itredux.com

The main one I'd heard of is heroku garden (formerly heroku), which combines Ruby with Amazon's cloud compute offerings.

Plenty of people mention CodeIde and Coghead. Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly are not qute the target topic, but they get an honorable mention.

Assume that your children's generation are using online programming environments for all of their programming needs. How do you see it working? What innovations are required to make it feasible?

 

'Andy Brice' on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:56:54 GMT, sez:

Once they have put enough stuff inside the browser to make a web-based IDE possible the browser will have become an OS. And then we will be right back where started.

'Jerry' on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:48:24 GMT, sez:

Maybe for some open source projects, or some hobby programmers, but I cant imagine to allow programmers coding serious business apps using an online IDE.

'Helen' on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:05:11 GMT, sez:

My desktop IDE is bad enough. Takes ten minutes to actually get to being productive with the thing, gets in my way almost as often as it helps me. Online or desktop, can I have an IDE that doesn't treat me like a naughty child?

'OJ' on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:52:21 GMT, sez:

CDE (Cloud Development Environment). Neat idea. This would provide us geeks with exactly what we want - the means to work on our home projects while we're away on holiday WITHOUT having to take our own laptops! No more suffering boring conversations with relatives at the end-of-year holiday meetups, your dev env is at your fingertips anywhere in the world. It'll even work on Windows ME and Linux!

In all seriousness, IDE's are definitely already slow enough WITHOUT being shoved in a browser. In my view this is the kind of application that doesn't belong anywhere other than on the desktop utilising the local hardware.

Online IDEs would have a plethora of issues to deal with. How would you go about tracking down memory leaks? Stray pointers? How would you deal with version control?

Yes there might be answers to these questions, but none of them are nice.

Fat IDE (FIDE?) for the win!

Great post mate ;)

'lb' on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:53:57 GMT, sez:

@OJ:
fat ide for the win??

maybe: fat ides lead to fat code, leads to fatter ides leads to fatter code, leads to slow ides, lead to the dark side.

i'm picturing a more wiki-like experience. With brief, composable languages used to piece together very small and testable programs into a larger working system.

each part of the system is small, and can fail (or be improved) without bringing down the whole system. There's never a need to rebuild the entire system at once.

the version control has more in common with revision control on a wiki than with git.

because the components are changed individually, a changeset applies to just one part -- not a big bang changeset that applies across many components.

(note i resisted the temptation to say:
"rather than using a fat ide, you should try a more powerful and lightweight ide like emacs or vim.")

'Judah' on Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:02:14 GMT, sez:

I think it's a brilliant idea. I wish I had the know-how to build it and make a million bucks off it.

Here are some thoughts how it might work:

- Compilations are spread over multiple machines in the cloud, so compile times are zilch.

- Memory usage is zilch, since it's not running on your computer.

- You can run the program in the cloud, as if running via remote desktop.

- You can run the program locally, having the online IDE send you only the changed bits of files since the last local run.

- You can test your program on different OSes no problem; the IDE will let you run the compiled program on any OS you specify, web applications viewed on any web browser you specify.

Think of this: you never have to worry about slow build times, Visual Studio hogging 2GB of RAM, no more sitting there at the Add Reference dialog while Visual Studio enumerates all the COM objects on the system. Right-click, refactor takes milliseconds, because the work is spread over powerful server computers in the cloud.

It will be a major improvement over the crusty old local IDEs we've been running for the last few decades.

'Vincent Massol' on Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:45:53 GMT, sez:

Hi there,

Nice idea. I've been wanting this since 2001. I blogged about it in 2003 here:
http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/vmassol/archives/think_tank.html#000530_jini_ide_is_it_the_future

and that post was reposted on TheServerSide here:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=23873

Hope I'll live to see it implemented one day :)

Cheers
-Vincent

'Philip Andrew' on Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:30:43 GMT, sez:

I'm working on one (not public yet).

Don't worry, people are working on this especially since there is a large market of people who would like to program but don't want to have to install all the STUFF you need ide, sdk etc.

'Stephan Leclercq' on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:30:39 GMT, sez:

How do you program on a customer site, if that customer (for whatever good or bad, technical or procedural reason) doesn't want you to connect to their corporate network?

'Jack' on Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:03:10 GMT, sez:

Well, here's your damn SQL schema designer!!

http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/demo/?keyword=default

'Jack' on Sat, 24 Jan 2009 08:06:18 GMT, sez:

And here's your online Visio and your online Gimp...

http://draw.labs.autodesk.com/ADDraw/draw.html

http://sumopaint.com/web/

'Jason Short' on Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:11:52 GMT, sez:

Yuck, you can already remote desktop without having anything installed on the local machine. You can even run remote desktop through a browser control. I even saw a VPC run through a browser control where the entire VPC was hosted on a server.

I can't imagine trying to do intellisense over a browser for objects that are not on my local machine.

'Judah' on Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:16:23 GMT, sez:

Mozilla recently announced Bespin, a "code in the cloud" editor of sorts. You guys might want to check it out:

https://bespin.mozilla.com

'Ivannywhere.net' on Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:10:01 GMT, sez:

Here is an Online IDE I've been working on for a while now - www.phpanywhere.net

Check it out!

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