10 ms·

"Can you selfhost the server-side?" is the biggest question If not, you're buying into dev platform-as-a-service.

by jimjams 5y ago

giansegato 5y ago
100% this. That's why Projector is an interesting project, completely different from — say — VSCode or Replit.
- andrewmackrodt 5y ago
  JetBrains have recently released a new project (JetBrains Gateway) which is worth a look at too https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2021.3/remote-development-starting-page.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2021.3/remote-developmen...
  - Scarbutt 5y ago
    hmmm they are fucked, such a horrible UX compared to vscode remote development.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Completely different from VSCode? The code for vscode.dev is already open source as part of VSCode. Microsoft doesn't provide any instructions for it (yet?) but that hasn't stopped the community from tackling it. A quick search turned up a couple different options: https://fribbledom.com/posts/selfhosting-vscode/ https://fribbledom.com/posts/selfhosting-vscode/ and https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch
technobabbler 5y ago
Funny, it's the opposite for me: Would someone please host the serverside so I don't have to? I'd love to pay for an IDE-as-a-service that updates itself, syncs itself everywhere, has all the right extensions, auto-configures Docker and data stores and secrets and Git and linting and Webpack interation and and and... etc. Something like Vercel but for the IDE. I hate fighting IDEs (whether it's IntelliJ or VSCode) before I can write useful code. Javascript has gotten so bloated that half the challenge of any new project is setting up tooling. God, I'd love a 1-click "create new project" and then a GDocs-like IDE in the cloud, and would happily pay to never have to configure that again myself.
- ecf 5y ago
  Create a repository with the result of one of those setups and use that as a base for any new project? Not sure why this needs to be something developers can’t fine tune for themself.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Because laziness, frankly. I'm just too jaded to care about optimizing the toolchain anymore, when more often than not it results in 30% more performance, one cool new feature, and ten new bugs. If you enjoy that sort of tinkering, more power to you... you're probably a better dev & devops person than I am.
- thrashh 5y ago
  Doesn’t IntelliJ sync most of that? I use IntelliJ on 3 computers and all my extensions and even themes are synced. And are you aware of platforms like Cloud9 that have been available for 10 years that give you an online developer environment? Honestly the only two reasons I personally don’t use them is because (1) I’ve never been at any company or place in the world where the Internet was truly 100% available with dependably low latency and near zero jitter and (2) nothing beats IntelliJ for me.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    I've used IntelliJ for a decade (including several hours today) and it's never very seamless. The sync features are hit or miss, especially across platforms -- I've used it on various Windowses, Linuxes, and macOS. The hotkeys aren't the same, the interpreters aren't the same, the containers (Docker or Python) don't function the same, the linters don't present the same, the NPM modules don't always compile on different architectures (sigh, M1), the memory settings don't always persist, some are synced to Jetbrains and others are stored per-repo... it's a nightmare to untangle. The syncing is there, sort of, but it's far from seamless. There is still a lot of complexity and points of failure between the bare metal and my code (whether it's PHP or Python or Javascript). And if you can't afford IntelliJ ultimate and use separate products (like PyCharm and PHPStorm), the integrations are even worse, along with trying to figure out which product offers which feature (like Javascript support, or SQL). What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end. It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare. I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know. shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.
JohnFen 5y ago
Yes, this. I wouldn't ever dare to put my development in the hands of some third party service. It's just far too risky. But self-hosting such a system is something that I'd at least consider. Also, self-hosted or not, if the system is web-based, that's a dealbreaker.
tentacleuno 5y ago
I'm sure you could set up a VPN on your home WiFi, forward its ports, and login from an external WiFi, assuming the relevant ports aren't blocked on the external network you're on (in that case, I hear stunnel works wonders). I too would rather do this. Trusting Amazon with my personal development setup doesn't sound like a good idea; they have the power to shut that down completely at the click of a button.
jve 5y ago
Does Visual Studio Code remote development counts? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview Not that client is your browser, but locally installed VSCode.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  It definitely counts for me! I set up something similar a couple of years back when I wanted to do GPU-accelerated programming from my couch on my anaemic Chromebook (while connected to a 1st get Threadripper in my office). Initially I was using Jupyter, then realized I could work on my other projects using VS Code remotes (Virtualized Linux on Chromebook is great!).Immediately after, I realized I could VPN from the coffee shop or meetups, instead of doing the git push/git pull dance on the heavier Macbook
darkerside 5y ago
These types of services are mostly not aimed at established tech shops. Similar to Wix or Squarespace or Appian, if you already have an in house tech team, you don't need this, probably. But if you're just starting out, with a small and quite possibly partly outsourced team, this could be a cheaper and faster way to spin things up. Just like many companies don't have their own datacenter anymore, and even fewer have them literally onsite in a server closet.
perryizgr8 5y ago
In the beginning, you can. Then as code size, build times, testing requirements increase, they will upgrade the server. After a couple of years it will be impossible to run the server on your laptop.

"Can you selfhost the server-side?" is the biggest question If not, you're buying into dev platform-as-a-service.

giansegato 5y ago

100% this. That's why Projector is an interesting project, completely different from — say — VSCode or Replit.

andrewmackrodt 5y ago
JetBrains have recently released a new project (JetBrains Gateway) which is worth a look at too https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2021.3/remote-development-starting-page.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2021.3/remote-developmen...
- Scarbutt 5y ago
  hmmm they are fucked, such a horrible UX compared to vscode remote development.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jaywalk 5y ago
Completely different from VSCode? The code for vscode.dev is already open source as part of VSCode. Microsoft doesn't provide any instructions for it (yet?) but that hasn't stopped the community from tackling it. A quick search turned up a couple different options: https://fribbledom.com/posts/selfhosting-vscode/ https://fribbledom.com/posts/selfhosting-vscode/ and https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch

technobabbler 5y ago

Funny, it's the opposite for me: Would someone please host the serverside so I don't have to? I'd love to pay for an IDE-as-a-service that updates itself, syncs itself everywhere, has all the right extensions, auto-configures Docker and data stores and secrets and Git and linting and Webpack interation and and and... etc. Something like Vercel but for the IDE. I hate fighting IDEs (whether it's IntelliJ or VSCode) before I can write useful code. Javascript has gotten so bloated that half the challenge of any new project is setting up tooling. God, I'd love a 1-click "create new project" and then a GDocs-like IDE in the cloud, and would happily pay to never have to configure that again myself.

ecf 5y ago
Create a repository with the result of one of those setups and use that as a base for any new project? Not sure why this needs to be something developers can’t fine tune for themself.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Because laziness, frankly. I'm just too jaded to care about optimizing the toolchain anymore, when more often than not it results in 30% more performance, one cool new feature, and ten new bugs. If you enjoy that sort of tinkering, more power to you... you're probably a better dev & devops person than I am.
thrashh 5y ago
Doesn’t IntelliJ sync most of that? I use IntelliJ on 3 computers and all my extensions and even themes are synced. And are you aware of platforms like Cloud9 that have been available for 10 years that give you an online developer environment? Honestly the only two reasons I personally don’t use them is because (1) I’ve never been at any company or place in the world where the Internet was truly 100% available with dependably low latency and near zero jitter and (2) nothing beats IntelliJ for me.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  I've used IntelliJ for a decade (including several hours today) and it's never very seamless. The sync features are hit or miss, especially across platforms -- I've used it on various Windowses, Linuxes, and macOS. The hotkeys aren't the same, the interpreters aren't the same, the containers (Docker or Python) don't function the same, the linters don't present the same, the NPM modules don't always compile on different architectures (sigh, M1), the memory settings don't always persist, some are synced to Jetbrains and others are stored per-repo... it's a nightmare to untangle. The syncing is there, sort of, but it's far from seamless. There is still a lot of complexity and points of failure between the bare metal and my code (whether it's PHP or Python or Javascript). And if you can't afford IntelliJ ultimate and use separate products (like PyCharm and PHPStorm), the integrations are even worse, along with trying to figure out which product offers which feature (like Javascript support, or SQL). What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end. It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare. I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know. shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.

JohnFen 5y ago

Yes, this. I wouldn't ever dare to put my development in the hands of some third party service. It's just far too risky. But self-hosting such a system is something that I'd at least consider. Also, self-hosted or not, if the system is web-based, that's a dealbreaker.

tentacleuno 5y ago

I'm sure you could set up a VPN on your home WiFi, forward its ports, and login from an external WiFi, assuming the relevant ports aren't blocked on the external network you're on (in that case, I hear stunnel works wonders). I too would rather do this. Trusting Amazon with my personal development setup doesn't sound like a good idea; they have the power to shut that down completely at the click of a button.

jve 5y ago

Does Visual Studio Code remote development counts? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview Not that client is your browser, but locally installed VSCode.

sangnoir 5y ago
It definitely counts for me! I set up something similar a couple of years back when I wanted to do GPU-accelerated programming from my couch on my anaemic Chromebook (while connected to a 1st get Threadripper in my office). Initially I was using Jupyter, then realized I could work on my other projects using VS Code remotes (Virtualized Linux on Chromebook is great!).Immediately after, I realized I could VPN from the coffee shop or meetups, instead of doing the git push/git pull dance on the heavier Macbook

darkerside 5y ago

These types of services are mostly not aimed at established tech shops. Similar to Wix or Squarespace or Appian, if you already have an in house tech team, you don't need this, probably. But if you're just starting out, with a small and quite possibly partly outsourced team, this could be a cheaper and faster way to spin things up. Just like many companies don't have their own datacenter anymore, and even fewer have them literally onsite in a server closet.

perryizgr8 5y ago

In the beginning, you can. Then as code size, build times, testing requirements increase, they will upgrade the server. After a couple of years it will be impossible to run the server on your laptop.