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As the founder of Codeanywhere a competitor in the Cloud IDE space this event saddens me. They worked for years trying to change the way people code, but did no

As the founder of Codeanywhere a competitor in the Cloud IDE space this event saddens me. They worked for years trying to change the way people code, but did not make it in the end. Contrary to what people may or may not think, they will be missed.

Edmond 10y ago
Another developer tool maker here (crudzilla.com). Quite shocking though,they "appeared" to be doing quite ok.
- sytse 10y ago
  The big ones left seem to be Koding and Codenvy. Codenvy focuses on Eclipse Che. Koding is focussing more on Dev infrastructure than the online IDE. Even Heroku started as an online IDE. I wonder why online IDEs have such a hard time. I asked in GitLab and everyone said they didn't want to code in a browser for usability reasons. We're therefore exploring running the environment in the cloud but syncing the file system so you can use you local editor https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 What do people think? Is this the way to crack to problem and break the online IDE spell?
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    I think you have to ask why a developer would want to use an online IDE, and focus on that. Do online IDEs have a unique value proposition, or are they just another instance of the counterproductive "X but in the cloud!" formula?
    - sytse 10y ago
      I have the feeling that people want to build online IDE's and that management thinks it is a good idea. I've not encountered many developers that like to use it fulltime. One counter example is https://community.nitrous.io/posts/nitrous-io-stories-yehuda-katz-and-tilde-io https://community.nitrous.io/posts/nitrous-io-stories-yehuda...
  - SkyMarshal 10y ago
    >I asked in GitLab and everyone said they didn't want to code in a browser for usability reasons. Can't speak for anyone else but I'm constantly battling to keep my browser from crashing due to too many tabs. Namely Chrome and Firefox on Linux and OSX. I open tabs, then forget to close them. Even as I write this Chrome is popping up alert boxes saying so-and-so page has stopped responding, do I want to Kill or Wait? The thought of adding a fairly heavy-weight SPA IDE to that mix is not attractive. Out of curiosity, can Atom (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) load a remote IDE into its separate memory space? Only best-of-both worlds I can think of.
    - sytse 10y ago
      I agree that something like Atom (javascript IDE run locally) might be the best of both worlds. I think GitHub will lead the innovation with that.
    - raingrove 10y ago
      We had an Atom plugin called Nitrogen that did file sync, remote terminal, and app preview. https://community.nitrous.io/docs/using-the-nitrogen-atom-plugin https://community.nitrous.io/docs/using-the-nitrogen-atom-pl... Most of our users preferred the in-browser experience though...
  - Edmond 10y ago
    I personally think it is due to a lack of true innovation, most cloud IDEs are just copies of native IDEs minus the performance benefit. The browser is a powerful platform and when you combine that with a server you have something very capable, but you have to think creatively to harness that power.
  - ww520 10y ago
    Vendor locked in. Dependence on a fleeting platform. Network connection requirement.
  - kajecounterhack 10y ago
    1. A web IDE is widely used at Google and has instant syncing with the file system so you can use your local editor and immediately see the changes in the IDE. This is probably helped by the fact that your "local" code is actually a distributed filesystem mounted via FUSE. 2. Features of the web IDE that people love: it works offline via caching and syncs back up the same way you expect an offline Google Doc you were editing to sync. It has plugins (e.g vim bindings) that are most common feature requests from developers. You can build your code very quickly (yay distributed building). No startup time, it loads close to instantly like Google Docs does. Split pane editing, debuggers, linters, etc all built-in. Code search also built in, review tool integration, version control integration. 3. Outside of Google people don't want to pay a 3rd party to allow editing / storage / access of their code; it mostly comes down to "if I get used to a tool I need to be guaranteed it will be around forever," (open source solves this), "I want full control of where my code lives" (on-premise solves this), "performance + features" (not sure if this has been solved anywhere, like being able to modify your code locally and remotely and sync instantly)
    - sytse 10y ago
      Thanks for the feedback, very interesting. 1. So the web idea syncs with the distributed filesystem before any commits are made. We plan to sync the filesystem of the application development container to both your local filesystem and to another container that runs the web idea. That would allow for the same effect, or not? 2. Pretty cool it has operational transformations (OT). We looked at this but it seemed that you either have to pick someone with OT or something that works well with code. We're not doing distributed building but we're considering distributed testing https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19267 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19267 3. Yeah, this would work on your local GitLab instance, no third party needed.
      - kajecounterhack 10y ago
        1. Yeah, but it needs to handle unstable web connections gracefully. There's no locking in the UI even when your connection goes down, and when it comes back up it just uses last edited version (whether you made changes on your desktop or in the browser). Definitely tied to #2, which is that you need a sane way to merge conflicting changes. 2. I don't know for a fact they're using OTs but given that you can edit from local / web pretty much simultaneously that's a good guess. Since you don't generally get actual simultaneous edits however (or you don't really have to optimize for this use case since a dev is either editing from the IDE or locally and "simultaneous usage" would generally be a product of network latency), one idea is you could use a tree-like CRDT that tracks divergences and have a UI element that allows nice manual conflict merges. Or you could invent an automated merging strategy, which may or may not be pretty hard. 2b. in re distributed building, https://www.bazel.io https://www.bazel.io Google actually open sourced their build system but I'm not sure (I don't think) the distributed building aspect of it is included. Here's to hoping some headstrong engineer decides to write the open source version of it...that said it's probably not actually that important for most software 3. Cool. I'd love to see something like this from Gitlab! I think once people feel that they have control over the software and their code, it's all about usability, and if you nail that there will be plenty evangelizing the solution.
  - jlarocco 10y ago
    I guess I'd turn the question around and ask what problems are browser based IDEs trying to solve and what advantage do they have over regular IDEs? I'm a full-time C++ developer, which probably isn't the target for most browser IDEs, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway. My perception is that browser based IDEs are inflexible, fragile, slow, and don't scale. It's not even clear to me how a browser based IDE is supposed to work in my environment. Do I clone our source repo locally and open the file from there somehow? Do I clone it to the cloud somewhere? How does a browser IDE handle the third party libraries we link to? Where is compilation done? Where does the executable go? Am I able to debug and step through the binary in the browser? What if there's a GUI component? And don't even get me started on the clunkiness of text editing in a browser compared to an editor like Emacs or Vim. The whole concept of a browser based IDE just seems like a poorly thought out abuse of web technology.
    - sytse 10y ago
      Good points, running the environment in the cloud and the editor locally helps with some of the points, but doing debugging is hard. As a ex ruby developer I'm used to having an editor without the other IDE functions. I guess that IDE in the cloud is a big step from editor in the cloud.
  - TylerJewell 10y ago
    Eclipse Che is doing pretty well. Approaching 20,000 usage hours every day from telemetry, up from a couple hundred at the beginning of the year. Eclipse Che is focused on the dev infrastructure. It's about making the workspace completely portable and provisioned on any system without any effort from developers to have to set it up. Lots of use cases: 1. Hosted workspaces with workspace project sync - we provide a che-mount capability for this and it's based upon a fuse file system with unison sync. It can be fine-tuned with excludes and dual unison clients in such a way where the performance is really screaming. 2. Migration of workspaces from location to location for purposes of backup and recovery. 3. Having workspaces match their production topology, so that developers are working on a workspace that is identical to their production deployment. This requires workspace runtimes that are constructed by orchestrators like compose or other syntax. 4. The commonly discussed situations with instructors or team leaders setting up a workspace template which is used by others to facilitate getting started quicker. We are about to launch a team capability that allows a team leader to define a basic template of a workspace that is defined by stacks, composefile structures, and other meta data, but more importantly it explicitly states the aspects that are personal to each developer, so as each developer creates their own workspace replica from the template, they have to populate it with their personal information such as SSH keys, oauth access, database credentials and so forth. 5. Big software vendors value the extensibility of the che platform because there are many products that need workspaces inside of their products, and they would rather customize an off the shelf product vs. build their own. 6. Better agile. Context-sensitive pull requests, git issues, git repositories, issues, and CI jobs - opening a context-aware workspace is a big deal. We do a lot of enterprise customers that focus on those cases. It's hard to set this up on a desktop or with vagrant. We try to stay out of the IDE conflict. We are happy to work with any desktop IDE or provide our own for those that don't want to install something. But we are close to a future where each workspace can host multiple IDEs at the same time, including desktop IDEs that are pre-configured to work with the workspace configuration. The point is that if you sit 5 developers around the table and ask them if they want to code in the browser, you can anticipate the response that you will get. But if you sit 5 development teams around the table and ask them about problems they have with developer onboarding, agile team management, collaboration, developer support, vagrant and using VMs / virtual labs as development environments, then suddenly there are a lot of pains around the table. We think Che is doing really well because we have tapped into this particular need with some efficiency. And we consciously try to avoid being the world's best IDE because of the issues stated previously. Also, with the language server protocol that we announced with Microsoft and Red Hat this summer, it has really taken off. I can see us having support for 20 languages with intellisense + debugging by the end of Q1. It allows the language providers to maintain really good intellisense and we provide the infrastructure around that. And then we can focus on workspace provisioning and giving developers access (without installing software) to intellisense for the languages they love. And 90% of the world is covered by the 75% capabilities of most language servers on the market. So we can be increasingly language and tooling agnostic, while providing great services to teams. Along these lines, we have a new team management offering shipping in a few weeks, not to mention Che 5 - which we'll announce at CheConf. And CheConf is our first users conference that we are holding on 11/15, and after two weeks of promotion, we are pretty stunned that we are approaching 1500 registrations.
nowarninglabel 10y ago
If it's ok to tack on here, how do you convince developers to move to Cloud IDEs? I've been trying to convince my team, but they are glued to PHPStorm and thus my attempts to move them meet steady resistance. The value-prop for me makes sense though, get out of the business of trying to maintain a vm on everyone's machine. Granted maybe we could solve it in other ways with containers or such but Cloud9, Codeanywhere, and some of these other tools seem like the right thing to move to.
- canada_dry 10y ago
  > how do you convince developers to move to Cloud IDEs Well... to be honest that's a pretty tough sell. Especially in light of this (reasonably) popular one shutting down with hardly any notice. As a former IT Exec I don't know of any development Directors who want to trust their critical path development to someone else's cloud based IDE.
  - kajecounterhack 10y ago
    On-premise installations of some open-source software seems to be the path.
- Sophistifunk 10y ago
  To be honest I think we need to stop thinking that "cloud development" needs to be in a browser. People like to do all sorts of things with their IDE that I certainly hope browsers never let pages do, like intercepting certain command keys, controlling the layout of multiple windows interacting with and knowing more about the user's display dimensions and multi-monitor, etc. Not to mention things like vertical-selection, or multiple cursor modes for column editing, which can't be done at all in any of the current web-based editors which AFAIK are all based on contentEditable rather than a custom renderer like the original Bespin (I think, that thing changed codewords a lot). Now some of these can be addressed with Electron or similar, but there's a lot of things that are nice to do in a code editor that just aren't compatible with the DOM itself, and need a deeper customisation of the rendering and input management. TL/DR - it's mostly UX :D
programminggeek 10y ago
Perhaps changing human behavior to do something they don't naturally want to do is not the best basis for a business.
bphogan 10y ago
This was a dream for coding bootcamps, classrooms, etc. Unfortunately I keep hearing from lots of places that you just can't make money in edu. But man, I love these tools for teaching people how to code. It's the only way to go. I wish Codeanywhere and others the best of luck.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  I really disagree with that. If you're learning how to use it then you should also learn how to install it, and use it outside of the learning environment. And by the time that you've installed it once, it won't be an issue again.
  - peterder 10y ago
    Depends. I spent some time teaching high school students. A large portion of them will not write any code after taking the class. Teaching them how to install and configure an IDE is a pretty useless skill in that context. Instead, even if they never code again, teaching them a little bit about how to think like a computer and some basic computer skills (many of them were almost computer illiterate) seemed like a much more valuable use of time.
  - bphogan 10y ago
    No. If you are going to develop professionally with a language then you should know how to install the environment. But that's a huge ask for people just learning. I have fought through issues of setting up a development environment for modern web development for the last ten years in boot camps and classrooms. When everyone brings their own device, you run into tons of issues you can't control. Students get confused by differences in terminals, text editors, and many other factors. The instructor's environment must match what the students have. And these allow for that. And if you think "well, if they can't bother to set up their own evironment, they shouldn't be writing code cos they're not smart enough," I'll offer this. While I agree that it's important to know your tools as a professional, we are not talking about professionals here. We are often not even talking about people who want to be professional software developers. There are many people who have studied their field for years and are probably much smarter than many of us here are now getting into code because it's a tool for them to do their work better. It is in my opinion arrogant to insist they set up their own tools before they can learn what we do.
TylerJewell 10y ago
It would be easy to say that Nitrous' issues were due to technology or the market not being excited. But they went through 3 different CEOs and did not advance / innovate for a number of years after raising a bunch of money. The market shifted on them and they didn't adapt to that. I think that in their case, they had other issues beyond technology that got in their way. They were way way ahead of Codenvy and Che, and in many ways Cloud9IDE 4 years ago when all of us raised our money. And they just didn't adapt. By all rights, my company, Codenvy should have been out of business because of Nitrous. They had a good 2 year advantage on us with Docker workspace management. They had top top tier investors with seemingly endless pockets and a native understanding of how to sell into the enterprise or with SaaS. Essentially, they had a stacked deck. If they had innovated or open sourced their IP it into the right community two years ago, we would have had no oxygen to pursue our Eclipse Che strategy. That would have turned us into a #3 or even worse a #4 or #5 vendor. That would have cut off additional capital, not a great growth strategy, and death would have been likely. At this point we are a #1 or #2 vendor, and likely the #1 vendor by revenues given the number of enterprises we have with onpremises systems. I don't know what we would have done if Nitrous had moved differently 3 years ago, but for a number of years I obsessed about them as a competitor, refreshing their home page every day.

Edmond 10y ago

Another developer tool maker here (crudzilla.com). Quite shocking though,they "appeared" to be doing quite ok.

sytse 10y ago
The big ones left seem to be Koding and Codenvy. Codenvy focuses on Eclipse Che. Koding is focussing more on Dev infrastructure than the online IDE. Even Heroku started as an online IDE. I wonder why online IDEs have such a hard time. I asked in GitLab and everyone said they didn't want to code in a browser for usability reasons. We're therefore exploring running the environment in the cloud but syncing the file system so you can use you local editor https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 What do people think? Is this the way to crack to problem and break the online IDE spell?
- nitrogen 10y ago
  I think you have to ask why a developer would want to use an online IDE, and focus on that. Do online IDEs have a unique value proposition, or are they just another instance of the counterproductive "X but in the cloud!" formula?
  - sytse 10y ago
    I have the feeling that people want to build online IDE's and that management thinks it is a good idea. I've not encountered many developers that like to use it fulltime. One counter example is https://community.nitrous.io/posts/nitrous-io-stories-yehuda-katz-and-tilde-io https://community.nitrous.io/posts/nitrous-io-stories-yehuda...
- SkyMarshal 10y ago
  >I asked in GitLab and everyone said they didn't want to code in a browser for usability reasons. Can't speak for anyone else but I'm constantly battling to keep my browser from crashing due to too many tabs. Namely Chrome and Firefox on Linux and OSX. I open tabs, then forget to close them. Even as I write this Chrome is popping up alert boxes saying so-and-so page has stopped responding, do I want to Kill or Wait? The thought of adding a fairly heavy-weight SPA IDE to that mix is not attractive. Out of curiosity, can Atom (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) load a remote IDE into its separate memory space? Only best-of-both worlds I can think of.
  - sytse 10y ago
    I agree that something like Atom (javascript IDE run locally) might be the best of both worlds. I think GitHub will lead the innovation with that.
  - raingrove 10y ago
    We had an Atom plugin called Nitrogen that did file sync, remote terminal, and app preview. https://community.nitrous.io/docs/using-the-nitrogen-atom-plugin https://community.nitrous.io/docs/using-the-nitrogen-atom-pl... Most of our users preferred the in-browser experience though...
- Edmond 10y ago
  I personally think it is due to a lack of true innovation, most cloud IDEs are just copies of native IDEs minus the performance benefit. The browser is a powerful platform and when you combine that with a server you have something very capable, but you have to think creatively to harness that power.
- ww520 10y ago
  Vendor locked in. Dependence on a fleeting platform. Network connection requirement.
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  1. A web IDE is widely used at Google and has instant syncing with the file system so you can use your local editor and immediately see the changes in the IDE. This is probably helped by the fact that your "local" code is actually a distributed filesystem mounted via FUSE. 2. Features of the web IDE that people love: it works offline via caching and syncs back up the same way you expect an offline Google Doc you were editing to sync. It has plugins (e.g vim bindings) that are most common feature requests from developers. You can build your code very quickly (yay distributed building). No startup time, it loads close to instantly like Google Docs does. Split pane editing, debuggers, linters, etc all built-in. Code search also built in, review tool integration, version control integration. 3. Outside of Google people don't want to pay a 3rd party to allow editing / storage / access of their code; it mostly comes down to "if I get used to a tool I need to be guaranteed it will be around forever," (open source solves this), "I want full control of where my code lives" (on-premise solves this), "performance + features" (not sure if this has been solved anywhere, like being able to modify your code locally and remotely and sync instantly)
  - sytse 10y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, very interesting. 1. So the web idea syncs with the distributed filesystem before any commits are made. We plan to sync the filesystem of the application development container to both your local filesystem and to another container that runs the web idea. That would allow for the same effect, or not? 2. Pretty cool it has operational transformations (OT). We looked at this but it seemed that you either have to pick someone with OT or something that works well with code. We're not doing distributed building but we're considering distributed testing https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19267 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19267 3. Yeah, this would work on your local GitLab instance, no third party needed.
    - kajecounterhack 10y ago
      1. Yeah, but it needs to handle unstable web connections gracefully. There's no locking in the UI even when your connection goes down, and when it comes back up it just uses last edited version (whether you made changes on your desktop or in the browser). Definitely tied to #2, which is that you need a sane way to merge conflicting changes. 2. I don't know for a fact they're using OTs but given that you can edit from local / web pretty much simultaneously that's a good guess. Since you don't generally get actual simultaneous edits however (or you don't really have to optimize for this use case since a dev is either editing from the IDE or locally and "simultaneous usage" would generally be a product of network latency), one idea is you could use a tree-like CRDT that tracks divergences and have a UI element that allows nice manual conflict merges. Or you could invent an automated merging strategy, which may or may not be pretty hard. 2b. in re distributed building, https://www.bazel.io https://www.bazel.io Google actually open sourced their build system but I'm not sure (I don't think) the distributed building aspect of it is included. Here's to hoping some headstrong engineer decides to write the open source version of it...that said it's probably not actually that important for most software 3. Cool. I'd love to see something like this from Gitlab! I think once people feel that they have control over the software and their code, it's all about usability, and if you nail that there will be plenty evangelizing the solution.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  I guess I'd turn the question around and ask what problems are browser based IDEs trying to solve and what advantage do they have over regular IDEs? I'm a full-time C++ developer, which probably isn't the target for most browser IDEs, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway. My perception is that browser based IDEs are inflexible, fragile, slow, and don't scale. It's not even clear to me how a browser based IDE is supposed to work in my environment. Do I clone our source repo locally and open the file from there somehow? Do I clone it to the cloud somewhere? How does a browser IDE handle the third party libraries we link to? Where is compilation done? Where does the executable go? Am I able to debug and step through the binary in the browser? What if there's a GUI component? And don't even get me started on the clunkiness of text editing in a browser compared to an editor like Emacs or Vim. The whole concept of a browser based IDE just seems like a poorly thought out abuse of web technology.
  - sytse 10y ago
    Good points, running the environment in the cloud and the editor locally helps with some of the points, but doing debugging is hard. As a ex ruby developer I'm used to having an editor without the other IDE functions. I guess that IDE in the cloud is a big step from editor in the cloud.
- TylerJewell 10y ago
  Eclipse Che is doing pretty well. Approaching 20,000 usage hours every day from telemetry, up from a couple hundred at the beginning of the year. Eclipse Che is focused on the dev infrastructure. It's about making the workspace completely portable and provisioned on any system without any effort from developers to have to set it up. Lots of use cases: 1. Hosted workspaces with workspace project sync - we provide a che-mount capability for this and it's based upon a fuse file system with unison sync. It can be fine-tuned with excludes and dual unison clients in such a way where the performance is really screaming. 2. Migration of workspaces from location to location for purposes of backup and recovery. 3. Having workspaces match their production topology, so that developers are working on a workspace that is identical to their production deployment. This requires workspace runtimes that are constructed by orchestrators like compose or other syntax. 4. The commonly discussed situations with instructors or team leaders setting up a workspace template which is used by others to facilitate getting started quicker. We are about to launch a team capability that allows a team leader to define a basic template of a workspace that is defined by stacks, composefile structures, and other meta data, but more importantly it explicitly states the aspects that are personal to each developer, so as each developer creates their own workspace replica from the template, they have to populate it with their personal information such as SSH keys, oauth access, database credentials and so forth. 5. Big software vendors value the extensibility of the che platform because there are many products that need workspaces inside of their products, and they would rather customize an off the shelf product vs. build their own. 6. Better agile. Context-sensitive pull requests, git issues, git repositories, issues, and CI jobs - opening a context-aware workspace is a big deal. We do a lot of enterprise customers that focus on those cases. It's hard to set this up on a desktop or with vagrant. We try to stay out of the IDE conflict. We are happy to work with any desktop IDE or provide our own for those that don't want to install something. But we are close to a future where each workspace can host multiple IDEs at the same time, including desktop IDEs that are pre-configured to work with the workspace configuration. The point is that if you sit 5 developers around the table and ask them if they want to code in the browser, you can anticipate the response that you will get. But if you sit 5 development teams around the table and ask them about problems they have with developer onboarding, agile team management, collaboration, developer support, vagrant and using VMs / virtual labs as development environments, then suddenly there are a lot of pains around the table. We think Che is doing really well because we have tapped into this particular need with some efficiency. And we consciously try to avoid being the world's best IDE because of the issues stated previously. Also, with the language server protocol that we announced with Microsoft and Red Hat this summer, it has really taken off. I can see us having support for 20 languages with intellisense + debugging by the end of Q1. It allows the language providers to maintain really good intellisense and we provide the infrastructure around that. And then we can focus on workspace provisioning and giving developers access (without installing software) to intellisense for the languages they love. And 90% of the world is covered by the 75% capabilities of most language servers on the market. So we can be increasingly language and tooling agnostic, while providing great services to teams. Along these lines, we have a new team management offering shipping in a few weeks, not to mention Che 5 - which we'll announce at CheConf. And CheConf is our first users conference that we are holding on 11/15, and after two weeks of promotion, we are pretty stunned that we are approaching 1500 registrations.

nowarninglabel 10y ago

If it's ok to tack on here, how do you convince developers to move to Cloud IDEs? I've been trying to convince my team, but they are glued to PHPStorm and thus my attempts to move them meet steady resistance. The value-prop for me makes sense though, get out of the business of trying to maintain a vm on everyone's machine. Granted maybe we could solve it in other ways with containers or such but Cloud9, Codeanywhere, and some of these other tools seem like the right thing to move to.

canada_dry 10y ago
> how do you convince developers to move to Cloud IDEs Well... to be honest that's a pretty tough sell. Especially in light of this (reasonably) popular one shutting down with hardly any notice. As a former IT Exec I don't know of any development Directors who want to trust their critical path development to someone else's cloud based IDE.
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  On-premise installations of some open-source software seems to be the path.
Sophistifunk 10y ago
To be honest I think we need to stop thinking that "cloud development" needs to be in a browser. People like to do all sorts of things with their IDE that I certainly hope browsers never let pages do, like intercepting certain command keys, controlling the layout of multiple windows interacting with and knowing more about the user's display dimensions and multi-monitor, etc. Not to mention things like vertical-selection, or multiple cursor modes for column editing, which can't be done at all in any of the current web-based editors which AFAIK are all based on contentEditable rather than a custom renderer like the original Bespin (I think, that thing changed codewords a lot). Now some of these can be addressed with Electron or similar, but there's a lot of things that are nice to do in a code editor that just aren't compatible with the DOM itself, and need a deeper customisation of the rendering and input management. TL/DR - it's mostly UX :D

programminggeek 10y ago

Perhaps changing human behavior to do something they don't naturally want to do is not the best basis for a business.

bphogan 10y ago

This was a dream for coding bootcamps, classrooms, etc. Unfortunately I keep hearing from lots of places that you just can't make money in edu. But man, I love these tools for teaching people how to code. It's the only way to go. I wish Codeanywhere and others the best of luck.

Nullabillity 10y ago
I really disagree with that. If you're learning how to use it then you should also learn how to install it, and use it outside of the learning environment. And by the time that you've installed it once, it won't be an issue again.
- peterder 10y ago
  Depends. I spent some time teaching high school students. A large portion of them will not write any code after taking the class. Teaching them how to install and configure an IDE is a pretty useless skill in that context. Instead, even if they never code again, teaching them a little bit about how to think like a computer and some basic computer skills (many of them were almost computer illiterate) seemed like a much more valuable use of time.
- bphogan 10y ago
  No. If you are going to develop professionally with a language then you should know how to install the environment. But that's a huge ask for people just learning. I have fought through issues of setting up a development environment for modern web development for the last ten years in boot camps and classrooms. When everyone brings their own device, you run into tons of issues you can't control. Students get confused by differences in terminals, text editors, and many other factors. The instructor's environment must match what the students have. And these allow for that. And if you think "well, if they can't bother to set up their own evironment, they shouldn't be writing code cos they're not smart enough," I'll offer this. While I agree that it's important to know your tools as a professional, we are not talking about professionals here. We are often not even talking about people who want to be professional software developers. There are many people who have studied their field for years and are probably much smarter than many of us here are now getting into code because it's a tool for them to do their work better. It is in my opinion arrogant to insist they set up their own tools before they can learn what we do.

TylerJewell 10y ago

It would be easy to say that Nitrous' issues were due to technology or the market not being excited. But they went through 3 different CEOs and did not advance / innovate for a number of years after raising a bunch of money. The market shifted on them and they didn't adapt to that. I think that in their case, they had other issues beyond technology that got in their way. They were way way ahead of Codenvy and Che, and in many ways Cloud9IDE 4 years ago when all of us raised our money. And they just didn't adapt. By all rights, my company, Codenvy should have been out of business because of Nitrous. They had a good 2 year advantage on us with Docker workspace management. They had top top tier investors with seemingly endless pockets and a native understanding of how to sell into the enterprise or with SaaS. Essentially, they had a stacked deck. If they had innovated or open sourced their IP it into the right community two years ago, we would have had no oxygen to pursue our Eclipse Che strategy. That would have turned us into a #3 or even worse a #4 or #5 vendor. That would have cut off additional capital, not a great growth strategy, and death would have been likely. At this point we are a #1 or #2 vendor, and likely the #1 vendor by revenues given the number of enterprises we have with onpremises systems. I don't know what we would have done if Nitrous had moved differently 3 years ago, but for a number of years I obsessed about them as a competitor, refreshing their home page every day.