Looking at the list, it appears they don't support Java, but that's only because is not actually in alpha order, as it first appears to be. Java listed right at the start (between COBOL and C#).
I've been doing this with Cloud9 for quite some time now. Just link your Bitbucket account (or Github, for that matter), and you can work with it directly in the Cloud9 IDE. Haven't checked out CodeAnywhere in a while, though, so I'm going to see how it compares.
I've been hoping for a while that github and similar would parse source files and allow me to hop through to definitions and other usage for tokens throughout a repo. I'm not yet convinced I need a cloud IDE, but this would be a nice step in the right direction.
This seems pretty nifty. However, how does the IDE itself stack up against something like IntelliJ/PyCharm/Visual Studio/etc?
My current solution to needing to develop on multiple machines is to keep an external SSD with me that has a Linux VM development environment. It's inconvenient in certain ways, but I have a completely customized environment & toolchain that's reproducible and reliable anywhere VirtualBox is installed.
I would be interested in a cloud solution, but the JetBrains products are so amazing and so I would be hesitant to migrate even with how clean this solution looks compared to mine.
I really does depend on how and what you use. We build Codeanywhere entirely and exclusively inside Codanywhere, and have teams that do the same, ranging from 5 people to 200 people. So all I can say is try it out and let us know how you feel it stacks up.
You cannot compare a web based IDE to a full featured GUI application as currently the GUI's win in terms of overall features, but where the web based IDE's excel is the flexibility of coding from anywhere without installing a full featured GUI on every machine.
The industry tends to swing from one extreme to the other. Long ago we had dumb terminals and all our work was done on a central server. Find a grey beard and they'll regale you with stories of VAX and other time share systems.
Find someone slightly younger and they'll share stories of using notepad and loosing whole projects because their desktop hard drive failed.
While today we have a distributed source control system, powerful desktops and powerful servers. I too fail to see the logic on moving back to running a thin client for development.
Seems like today we have the best of both worlds -- powerful desktop computers that can easily back themselves up to the cloud either in whole via backup services or in part via replicated version control systems like git or remote drive sync things like Google Drive or Dropbox. You get the local power of a desktop plus the reliability of replicated managed storage. You can also easily connect cheap huge external hard drives for on-site additional backups that you control.
So yeah, why?
I see cloud IDEs as a product of a few years ago when "everything is going to the web." Today "everything is going to mobile" so you're seeing similar attempts to force fit everything into that model.
The only rationale I can see for a cloud IDE is fine grained real-time collaboration features that work easily everywhere, but in practice I've rarely wanted such a thing. Having more than one person typing on the same source file is just obnoxious. Another use case I can imagine is people who are total nomads, but then again a Macbook Air or similar tiny laptop is pretty portable.
Wanting to move things to the web is more about wanting them on multiple devices. If we had an operating system that allowed us to work on the same stuff on all our devices, it wouldn't be so big of a deal. Unfortunately, at present, we need a different OS and a different set of apps for every form factor, and even then syncing complex data is a pain.
Presumably, it shares the common advantages of any web-app, e.g.
* Always up-to-date
* Always available on any machine (in theory)
* Built-in accessibility (if designed properly)
* Less of a security risk to local machine
Of course, that's not to say there are no disadvantages ...
- requires Internet to work (Internet is not electricity yet, + I'm personally opposed to putting things on-line that don't have any reason to be there)
- you don't control updates (what 'georgemcbay said about VS 6.0 + devops hell when you don't get to control your dependencies)
- current web apps suck at customization (I can't imagine having my Emacs in cloud)
- as the IDE goes to cloud, so does the file system, thus seriously crippling usability (closely tying data to applications is one of the stupidest things that came out of SaaS trend)
When it comes to tools you rely on to do day-to-day development "Always up-to-date" is, at best, a very debatable advantage if looked at from the point of view as the user and not the developer of the tool.
As a for-example, the initial Visual Studio .NET IDE releases were horrible and most people I know who did Windows development in that time-frame stayed on VS6 for quite a long time after it was officially obsolete.
- they spin boxes for you.Imagine you want to try that new tech without installing virtual box or vagrant on your computer,well that's how I started learning go.Integrated multi-user programming.
- You can do peer programming easily or if you are doing some tutoring you can see what the student is typing and correct it.So 2 people can work on the same files at the same time,...
- cloud9 editor has good performances,integrates well with git,github and co.
- You can preview web projects online directly(start a server,go to a url and see the result...),
- SSH login into you own box or server and remote file editing with.
Now does it have "intellisense" or autocompletion or refactoring tools for Java,C# and Co? no. But it does a good job at editing scripting language files.
The appeal here is really, quick editing or quick experiments.It's a bit like js fiddle,it's a code playground.
And it's opensource(at least the previous version was).
I can develop part-time on my Chromebook, and have the same development environment, build environment, etc etc, as on my desktop. Even if I had a laptop running Linux, I'd have to fiddle around with Vagrant to get that.
It is great if you are a student without a dedicated machine somewhere. I can use any machine with an internet connection and work on my code projects.
I haven't used the one in the OP but I do use http://mbed.org/ for embedded development. There you can use a tickbox to import someone else's library code into your project (or you own, of course) and track/import any modifications of it.
When it launched there were fears about lock in, but you can export it to an offline GCC environment any time.
Being able to edit files from any physical location is nice. Although you already get this from just using github/bitbucket, for the most part.
I think the biggest drawback to an online IDE is the development box itself. Are you comfortable developing with just 256mb - 1024mb of RAM? For some web apps and low-CPU projects, this may be fine. Otherwise, you're going to lack that processing power and speed.
256mb - 1024mb of RAM are the specs of free vms, which are given only as a demo. If you want to use online IDE for something more serious you can buy much more powerful vm.
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