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Create web apps in JavaScript right from your browser
- keyle 16y agoThat's really impressive. I've been working on a web only code editor for a few weeks (on and off), so I can appreciate the work gone into this. They built it using Objective-J (according to the source code).
- cubicle67 16y agoYou've no idea how good it is to see an IDE on an iPad. Editing doesn't seem to work, but so what; it's _there_
- olegp 16y agoWe are aware of this and are working on an on screen keyboard, kind of like this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual-keyboards-in-google.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual-k... To answer the question below: we would need a custom layout to ensure all the curly brackets and other common JS chars are one tap away
- Flow 16y agoWhy not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?
- mileszs 16y agoIt looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to do so.
- Flow 16y agoAlright, but shouldn't the solution be to allow the user to use either Google's keyboard or the built-in(by using textarea)? The built-in one has a dictionary and some autocompletion, which could be good or annoying... :)
- dnewcome 16y agoI have played with making an absolutely positioned single-char text input box in my custom editor (https://github.com/dnewcome/richie https://github.com/dnewcome/richie). The idea is that it forces the built-in keyboard to show but the input is caught and inserted into the DOM. I don't use contenteditable since it doesn't work on most mobile devices. My hacks are really rough but I think the technique could be polished eventually.
- gokhan 16y agoDon't work on iOS. In my web app, I display a plain textarea for iPhone and iPad, but it's not an IDE. Why doesn't @contenteditable work on the iPhone? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723592/why-doesnt-contenteditable-work-on-the-iphone http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723592/why-doesnt-content... Is contentEditable not supported by iPad? http://www.quora.com/Is-contentEditable-not-supported-by-iPad http://www.quora.com/Is-contentEditable-not-supported-by-iPa...
- bergie 16y agoAFAIK it supports contentEditable, but just doesn't show the keyboard for those elements. So theoretically formatting commands and such work.
- tchvil 16y agoThe Google docs team stopped to use contentEditable and developed instead a new "editing surface and layout engine" in Javascript. http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-new-google-docs.html http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about... I don't have an iPad(yet), but I tried a very basic page you can get at http://beebole.com/brol/contentEditable.html http://beebole.com/brol/contentEditable.html Tap the blue screen and start to type. On an android phone it works ok.
- olegp 16y agoyogsototh thank you for submitting this. We are seeing 150 or so concurrent users on the site due to this at the moment. I'm retweeting some of the other online reactions we're getting at https://twitter.com/akshell_com https://twitter.com/akshell_com
- drtse4 16y ago150? It's only the beginning :)
- olegp 16y agoYou were right ;) I'll write a blog post about it once things calm down a bit.
- biot 16y agoInteresting tweet: "... someone made the old @heroku for node.js" -- did Heroku start out as a browser-based app builder?
- olegp 16y agoYes they did, they were in the same batch as AppJet as well.
- tlrobinson 16y agoActually AppJet was summer 2007, Heroku was winter 2008.
- olegp 16y agoOh, then I've had it wrong for a while now. Thanks for pointing it out.
- timinman 16y agoYes, Heroku was the first. I tried it out. It was fun, but I think they realised that though it was a novel idea, it was not the _Big Idea_, and they replaced it with what they now have. That's pretty inspiring when you consider how much work they threw away and how that decision has been rewarded.
- TamDenholm 16y agoBe nice to see a non-OSX skin. :P
- olegp 16y agoYou could write your own, the interface is fairly open and Firebug is all you need.
- rstarkov 16y agoTook an hour and a bit yesterday to improve my eBay listings, like so: http://tinyurl.com/67dou5n http://tinyurl.com/67dou5n (link to the app, not eBay).
- olegp 16y agoThat's neat Roman, didn't know you were working on this. I'll have to put you in touch with somebody else who wanted to build an eBay app on top of Akshell.
- d0m 16y agoImpressive. May I ask what libraries do you use for the menubar and all UI widgets? Also, is the web a "pretty proxy" that redirect everything to a node.js server which does the actual work?
- mklappstuhl 16y agoIt's a kind of a Javascript framework called Cappucino, I assume.
- olegp 16y agoWe use a custom built server on top of V8. Unlike Node it's sync and modelled after http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/prefork.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/prefork.html
- LordCope 16y agoawesome stuff!
- fjakobs 16y agoGood work. As author of Ace (the source code editor) I'm always happy to see it being used. Do you guys have Cappuccino bindings for Ace you might consider sharing?
- olegp 16y agoSure, happy to share anything you find useful and thank you for the awesome work on Ace! Please send us an email here http://groups.google.com/group/akshell http://groups.google.com/group/akshell and we'll take it from there.
- korenyushkin 16y agoWe will share it on our blog and mailing list. It's quite simple, only 200 lines of code.
- olegp 16y agoPretty cool, we made a top tweet: https://twitter.com/#!/hakimel/status/49800596823351297 https://twitter.com/#!/hakimel/status/49800596823351297
- dev_Gabriel 16y agoThat's really cool.
- nbashaw 16y agoThank you so much for making this. I'm learning to program, and an intern at a place where I can't use my computer, can't install anything on their windows machines, and have a lot of free time. You just made my life a LOT better.
- Smerity 16y agoSounds like you need to get a better internship =] Mind you, if it pays well and you have enough spare time to pursue your own interests then it might not be such a bad thing overall!
- davej 16y agoCan somebody who has used both Akshell and Cloud9 IDE post a brief comparison?
- diamondhead 16y agoI didn't used both but gave try to bespin when it appeared (it evolved to cloud9 as i know) and liked. it's an advantage to have a universal gui, to not ignore users of other platforms. btw, i put some effort to build an online ide 4 years ago. i stopped maintaining it because my dream tool was evolved to firebug lite. anyway, my died ide can be seen at vimeo.com/azer for some web nostalgia
- sergimansilla 16y agoJust a small correction, Bespin evolved into Ace (which Akshell uses as their code editor), which was created by the guys that created Cloud9 (Ajax.org). Cloud9 is the actual IDE that uses Ace as its code editor. Find ace here: http://ace.ajax.org http://ace.ajax.org and Cloud9 here: http://c9.io http://c9.io
- diamondhead 16y agothanks for correcting. I've tried akshell also, it seems great.
- nekoZonbi 16y agoFrom my very brief test of both: The main difference is that cloud9Ide is a general purpose IDE, while akshell is intended as a tool for Akshell platform development. Akshell is an IDE (version 0.3 currently) to create javascript apps on the Akshell infrastructure. Which seem to be based nodeJS, or something similar: "The Akshell engine is based on Google V8. It compiles JavaScript code into native code; so execution is utterly fast." The Akshell infrastructure seems to be composed of a javascript/html framework, a relational database javascript API, the IDE to create apps, a git server to host code, and a infrastructure to handle deployment and scale of apps. It claims that the platform will be open sourced soon, so you will be able to host apps on your own server. The cloud9ide is a more general IDE, with syntax highlight for various languages: javascript, ruby, python, html, css, coffee script, XML, PHP, and more may be added in the future. Some features provided are integration with github, nodeJS debugging, team chat and team management, an extensions mechanism, and themes. I find syntax highlight to perform similar on both IDEs. Cloud9ide license is free for open source projects, with a monthly fee for private projects. I couldn’t find license terms on the Akshell Ide. Currently they are on open beta, and I suppose that pricing terms will be announced at a later time.
- codedivine 16y agoIn a similar vein, people should check out Ares SDK from Palm for WebOS. It is an entirely browser based IDE for creating apps for WebOS, which are also written using their Javascript/HTML/CSS based APIs. edit: https://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html https://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html
- roblund 16y agoThis is really cool. Your docs are well put together, and simple. It looks like you put a decent amount of time into them, which I really appreciate. Too many apps write the docs as an after-thought just before launch.
- olegp 16y agoThis is pretty good timing given we (Akshell) submitted to YC last night. Bad timing in the sense that I've only had two hours of sleep.
- ptn 16y agoSlick design, however, I don't understand the buttons. Why is 'eval' a joystick and commit a box? Also, whenever I hit Preview I get a 500.
- olegp 16y agoWe're changing that joystick to a VCR like play button. The commit one being a box hints at a shell or terminal, since we couldn't find an official Git icon. Could maybe put the GitHub Octocat there - what do you think?
- olegp 16y agoThanks for pointing out the 500 error occurring for new apps. Existing apps are unaffected and we are looking into it.
- korenyushkin 16y agoSorry, guys. We have SSH key pairs pregenerated for speed reasons and we've just run out of them today. Now everything should be OK.
- riffraff 16y agoawesome work, but FWIW, the first thing I get in the git console for help is two lines of "undefined", and an internal server error for "lol" in the eval screen, using chrome on ubuntu. But you are probably being overloaded ATM so I'll just wait and try again later :)
- olegp 16y agoYes, we're being hammered pretty hard. Thanks for pointing this out, will look into it right away.
- dimmuborgir 16y agoStupid question but what colorscheme is used for the editor? It's so easy on eyes.
- korenyushkin 16y agoIt's a standard colorscheme of the Ace editor http://ace.ajax.org/ http://ace.ajax.org/
- mikerg87 16y agoNo love for IE9?!
- olegp 16y agoIt works, but there are slight rendering errors with popups. We wanted to make sure it was perfect before officially supporting it. If you're really keen to see it in IE, you can fake the user agent headers to pretend to be Firefox or Chrome.
- kellysutton 16y agoWell. This is a good way to make my JS looking insignificant by comparison.
- mattmanser 16y agoLooks like it's built on Cappuccino: http://cappuccino.org/ http://cappuccino.org/ It's only recently become viable to use because of the performance improvements all the browsers have been making to their javascript engines. Last time I tried 280 slides it was painfully laggy (http://280slides.com/Editor/ http://280slides.com/Editor/). Not that I'm belittling the effort, it's pretty amazing work nonetheless. But have a play with cappuccino if you want to see what's doable!
- kellysutton 16y agoYeah. I saw a 280North presentation at FOWA Miami a few years back. Those guys are great.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nbaumann 16y agoThanks, now I'm not going to pay attention in class... :)
- steve_b 16y agoLooks great! Do you think you'll be including support for CoffeeScript?
- korenyushkin 16y agoYes, we think about it. CoffeeScript support should be easy to implement and seamless to use.
- growt 16y agoWow, this looks really great. One small suggestion: can you s/git// on the git shell? because I'm really used to type "git <cmd>" in a shell and it's hard to change the habit.
- roblund 16y agoI ran into this immediately as well.
- korenyushkin 16y agoThank you! We'll do something about it. May be we'll have a more universal console, where git will be only one of the commands.
- csomar 16y ago* A little bit faster. It's just fine for typing, but the menus and toolbar are a little bit slow. * Why only GIT? Support Mercurial with bitbucket if possible. * Add a context menu when user right clicks the mouse. It's important to have a copy/paste feature for files for example. ... and I'll move my JavaScript coding to it.
- tybris 16y agoLooks very well done. What I don't like is that is has a slow feel to it.
- olegp 16y agoWe're working to optimize it as much as we can. Which browser/OS/hardware are you on? If you're not on Chrome, can you try running it in that first and let me know if you see a speed increase?
- matthodan 16y agoI've been thinking about building something like this, but haven't had the time. I'm glad to see someone did it!
- Animus7 16y agoCool, but as a developer I'm having trouble seeing the market fit. Like many devs, I have my preferred IDE and I'm religious about it. And I'm fine with running my own server if it means I don't have to commit to a new proprietary framework; that's kind of a huge deal. I can see the benefit to budding web developers looking to get started, but those are probably also least likely to be paying for dev tools. This seems to be your approach in the docs, though. Thoughts?
- korenyushkin 16y agoThe Akshell engine will be open sourced soon, it will eliminate the problem of vendor lock-in. We strongly believe that web-based development environment are the future; so we'll improve our IDE and add more advanced features to it to provide cool experience.
- gregsadetsky 16y agoGreat work, congratulations! - Can you make the save-preview-reload cycle (much) faster? I found out that command-S triggered a Save, that's great. Does "Preview" have a keyboard shortcut as well? Could you have tooltips (when 'mouseovering' the toolbar icons) show the keyboard shortcut? In TextWrangler (and BBEdit in the past), I have F1 as the "Run" item of the shebang menu. It even works with unsaved files; developing/testing in Python gets addictive: type, F1, type, F1, etc. (yes, yes, I think before I type... ;-) it's still nice to be able to quickly run your code..!) - Will it be possible to console.log() strings and/or objects?
- korenyushkin 16y agoThank you for the suggestions! We'll add shortcuts and tooltips. We were rather conservative about it because wanted to collect some feedback. The IDE will have real-time console for logging.
- korenyushkin 16y agoThank you for the suggestions! We'll add shortcuts and tooltips. We were rather conservative about it because wanted to collect some feedback. The IDE will have real-time console for logging.
- coldflame23 16y agoNice job. a portable js IDE !
- eitland 16y agoIt took a while before I could find anything about the possibility to run on own/3-party servers. So far this is the most specific I've found: The engine will be open sourced soon to eliminate the vendor lock-in: you’ll be able to launch Akshell apps on your own server. Anyone else knows the details? Edit: Found some more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261786
- te_chris 16y agoVery cool, now if someone could just make a Javascript IDE that works on the desktop, I'm just beginning to work in node.js and do most of my PHP in NetBeans, I really want an IDE that recognises that a project can be JS!
- ndl 16y agoI have Firefox "3.6.16pre," through Ubuntu. When I try to access the app, it tells me that my browser isn't supported and sends me to mozilla.com to download... Firefox 3.6.15 Version check bug?
- korenyushkin 16y agoHave you tweaked the User Agent header? We just check for the 'Gecko' substring in it.
- js4all 16y agoFantastic job. You made great progress on the IDE. To get people's trust to invest work into your platform, it is essential to provide a solution running on a server of their choice.
- Sloven 16y agoGreat stuff. Thanks! It would be cool if left side panel be collapsible also not just draggable. In manner as it in visual studio.
- tuhin 16y agoIs it just me or is the Name field actually a single word "username"? I tried my name with space, it did not work but a single username worked just fine! If latter, you might want to change the Name: field to Username:.
- olegp 16y agoYou're right, we're changing the copy to "Username". We also want to encourage people to use the same username as on GitHub to make way for tighter integration with GitHub in the future.