Yes ... One of the key objectives that we are exploring with Eclipse Che is the idea of workspace portability. The workspace itself is composed of two things:

Yes ... One of the key objectives that we are exploring with Eclipse Che is the idea of workspace portability. The workspace itself is composed of two things: 1. The projects (and their source bindings), and: 2. Their environments, which are the stack of tools and runtimes that you need to perform work on the code such as refactoring, debugging, compiling. We have created an abstraction of the worksapce to the environment that it is bound to. And then this entire definition is exportable and movable between Che instances or to a cloud that is supporting Che, such as what Codenvy will run. Because the workspace definition defines its machines in the workspace object, then we can recreate the exact machine you need to do the same work on another node. We use docker to implement this behavior. We are not fully done with all of this work, but we have a lot of prototypes that prove this can do well. There are some challenges - if you want to "save" your workspace, do we snapshot the machines every time, or only sometime? Do we force a remote commit & push? it'll be up to the user. But once all of the commits are done, then we have to push the images into a shared registry and ensure that everything is remotely accessible. Once all of this is done then any other machine can reproduce an identical workspace.