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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

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.
ratorx 5y ago
I think that the 1-click (or 1 command) create-react-app style of development is part of the reason that JS has become so bloated. It encourages thinking in terms of framework and bundling of tons of dependencies as well as closely tying software with any underlying bundle/development/analysis process. The problem with this is that it doesn’t compose well… However, it is a catch-22. As more things want to become frameworks and wrap the entire process (for ease of use), there’s more monolithic stacks created, and it ends up with making it even more inaccessible without 1-click/command solutions.
- mikewhy 5y ago
  I think there's many advantages to it. Whole one company might be stuck in slower webpack/Babel hell, nextjs, remix, those that don't let the developer muck with the toolchain have been able to switch out for much faster & smaller bundlers. CRA is in a decent position to do similar.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  It's really unfortunate that JS won out in the web wars, another instance of the lowest common denominator winning out against technically superior options. If Microsoft hadn't been so evil, .NET is really a much better framework... but it didn't get enough traction. By contrast, PHP has actually evolved quite gracefully over the last decade, incorporating more and more desired features into the baseline language. Sadly it has no browser clientside option. Javascript is a victim of its own rapid success :(
xyzzy21 5y ago
Better to simply avoid the client-server architecture in the first place!

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.

ratorx 5y ago

I think that the 1-click (or 1 command) create-react-app style of development is part of the reason that JS has become so bloated. It encourages thinking in terms of framework and bundling of tons of dependencies as well as closely tying software with any underlying bundle/development/analysis process. The problem with this is that it doesn’t compose well… However, it is a catch-22. As more things want to become frameworks and wrap the entire process (for ease of use), there’s more monolithic stacks created, and it ends up with making it even more inaccessible without 1-click/command solutions.

mikewhy 5y ago
I think there's many advantages to it. Whole one company might be stuck in slower webpack/Babel hell, nextjs, remix, those that don't let the developer muck with the toolchain have been able to switch out for much faster & smaller bundlers. CRA is in a decent position to do similar.
technobabbler 5y ago
It's really unfortunate that JS won out in the web wars, another instance of the lowest common denominator winning out against technically superior options. If Microsoft hadn't been so evil, .NET is really a much better framework... but it didn't get enough traction. By contrast, PHP has actually evolved quite gracefully over the last decade, incorporating more and more desired features into the baseline language. Sadly it has no browser clientside option. Javascript is a victim of its own rapid success :(

xyzzy21 5y ago

Better to simply avoid the client-server architecture in the first place!