8 ms·

Show HN: Action.io - 0 to Rails in 60 seconds in your browser

210 points by iamclovin 14y ago

freshlog 14y ago
When I first saw the logo, I heard: "Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"
lucas3677 14y ago
Interesting idea. If this takes off, I feel like it'll end up in every developer's toolbox. Nicely done guys, looking forward to seeing the product!
vasco 14y ago
Looks really good, I hope the rails beta goes smoothly because I would really love to have this for Django. Loved the demo! PS. Why not: on console focus-loss -> file browser auto refresh
- raingrove 14y ago
  Good idea! We are adding that to our to-do list right now!
3pt14159 14y ago
Wow, I'm actually pretty sold. One question though, is there delay when typing in the browser as there normally is when you ssh into a box? That kinda drives me up the walls, and I am an emacs person.
- raingrove 14y ago
  As long as you choose an availability zone that is closest to you when setting up the box, the latency will be minimal. In our experience with using Vim on our boxes, it was not a big problem. Emacs will run just as fine! (We aren't taking sides, I used Emacs a lot when I was doing Scheme.)
  - raarky 14y ago
    can you migrate boxes between zones? in case you are travelling...
    - iamclovin 14y ago
      Yup! Also on our todo list.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  SSH delays are why I make so many typos in IRC. It doesn't matter for chat, but for serious coding it would be absolutely infuriating.
nicholassmith 14y ago
It looks really interesting, but one of the things I like about standard Rails dev work is I can work offline fairly easily. Mostly this a weird 'I have a really long commute' thing, so I will be keeping an eye on this.
- ajhit406 14y ago
  Yeah-- we're working on a solution for this, so stay tuned. We're thinking that dev ops drudge work is going to go the way of sys admin (thanks to heroku).
benbjohnson 14y ago
The technology looks awesome but is this a pain point for people? I like developing on my local machine. Setting up an environment can be a pain but I only have to do it once. After that I forget about it. Also, it worries me to depend on a third party service and my Internet connection to get work done.
- ajhit406 14y ago
  The initial version of the platform will be really helpful to beginners, designers, and anyone who's a bit allergic to the command line. We're working on some great collaboration features and sandboxing that will definitely make it useful for power users. We've also got a solution that we're working on that will allow offline development so you can use native editors and can work offline. Stay tuned.
LaSombra 14y ago
Maybe that will give Cloud9 a run for its money.
username3 14y ago
email with a plus sign: "There was an error creating your invite, try again."
- iamclovin 14y ago
  Fixed, thanks!
jpastika 14y ago
I really like what you have done. Having transitioned from a Windows/Visual Studio .NET application development environment to an OS X and Rails development environment within the last year, this would have been very useful.
munchor 14y ago
I really like what you've done. Personally, not for me, I prefer programming locally using emacs, but I think it'll be great for lots of people, it also looks good, nice design :)
nanijoe 14y ago
I'll be sold when they give me access :) Seriously though, I have an old Laptop that I still keep around mainly because rails is "set up right" for some of my older projects
dko 14y ago
This looks extremely promising. Setting up and maintaining consistent dev environments are a time suck for any company. Companies like Quora are already doing this internally on EC2 (http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Quora http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Qu...).
moe 14y ago
This looks technically very interesting (how did you do the terminal emulation, is that an OSS library?). However I'm almost sure I don't want my Vim and terminals in the browser, there surely will be all sorts of quirks with copy/paste etc. Can the remote filesystem be mounted so that we can just hack with our local terminals and editors?
- iamclovin 14y ago
  Yes, that's definitely in our pipeline.
- fishtoaster 14y ago
  If you're doing things on your local machine anyway, is there that much benefit over just using heroku?
  - JeanMertz 14y ago
    I guess full control over the VM stack is a big plus compared to Heroku
Argorak 14y ago
Hm. This is one of the rare times where a product actually does too much for me. If it gave me the ability to build and manage virtual envs for testing and development with ssh access (and maybe the ability to download them in say... vagrant box format) and nothing more, I would be sold immediately. With the glossy IDE finish: not my thing :/.
- iamclovin 14y ago
  You can completely do away with the IDE if you want and Vagrant integration is in our todo list for sure. P.S. Here's what Mitch (creator of Vagrant) has to say about action.io: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/215491864080547840 https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/215491864080547840
  - Argorak 14y ago
    Saw the initial tweet, but I did not see the discussion. Vagrant integration would be great, as I am traveling frequently and need my offline dev environment. Thanks for the info!
- mitchellh 14y ago
  Creator of Vagrant here. Disclaimer that any of the comments I say following are my own opinion and do not reflect what the action.io team is thinking. I'm very excited about the possibilities that action.io provides. Additionally, I think integration between the two would be the best of both worlds, providing a CLI based interface and possibly non-web based development through my virtualization providers (VirtualBox for now, many more coming soon), as well as web-based development should you want it using the fantastic tools that action.io is building. We'll talk and see if we can come to a mutual agreement/vision. :)
wakaflaka 14y ago
This could be a really awesome pair programming tool if you could have real time collaboration ala Google Docs.
weslly 14y ago
It looks nice, btw I thought it was something from http://iphone.appstorm.net/ http://iphone.appstorm.net/, the icon/favicon is almost the same.
xutopia 14y ago
This is how Heroku got started and they quickly figured out that the editor in the browser was an issue. No one liked it.
- iamclovin 14y ago
  The IDE is the first step. Our vision is to provide a set of tools so that your runtime is on the cloud (but can be sync'ed offline) and you can use whatever editor that you're most comfortable with.
  - davedx 14y ago
    Is everything going to be done "like a boss" or only tailing log files?
    - iamclovin 14y ago
      all the things
- raingrove 14y ago
  We are different in that we also provide a full GNU/Linux VM that you have direct SSH access to, so you are not limited to using the web-based IDE.
  - rapind 14y ago
    That's pretty cool and reflects how I've been planning to setup for a while now on a linode via ssh. What kind of pricing can we expect?
- drharris 14y ago
  I see it as they made an early exit and focused on the half of their system that seemed more promising income-wise. There is still a space for the all-in-one market, and frankly it's wide open. Environment + IDE + Deployment in one place definitely has a niche.
drharris 14y ago
Wow, I'm very impressed. There is definitely a killer app for this, and that is Windows rails development. While it's better than it used to be, it's still far from ideal, and time consuming to set up. Love the idea of being able to use a consistent environment across multiple platforms. Great job; looking forward to playing with this!
heretohelp 14y ago
Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference in mindset. Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? I mean, the other end of the spectrum is to be focused purely on the obscure and utterly advanced, like category theorists trying to harness Haskell. I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. (The middle of the proverbial road) Meanwhile, we've got Rails (and I mean this separately of Ruby. The non-Rails Ruby community is much more like the rest of us) at one end of the spectrum, and Haskell/Clean/etc. at the other. What the hell?
- localhost3000 14y ago
  '...web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness...' says it all right there, doesn't it? You know what makes me a happy programmer? Building things, not mucking about with setting up a new dev environment (and filling my machine with crap) every time I hop on a new client project. Make the 'trivial' shit go away so I can focus on the fun/interesting/creative/productive stuff...sounds good to me. I'm very interested in a product like this where I can configure on the fly and keep my machine uncluttered. (seriously, it just feels gross to have 6 different versions of rails and 4 different rubies installed on my machine, even if RVM makes it kinda easy)
  - johnbender 14y ago
    Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of swapping environments between projects. http://vagrantup.com http://vagrantup.com I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible collaboration.
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    I have that already with my stack, I'm not sure you understood me.
- Argorak 14y ago
  This is their first iteration. For a simple Rails app, setting up Ubuntu an RDBMS and Redis is trivial, thats true. The point is that managing 5 Rails apps, one on Mysql, two on Postgres, two on CouchDB, one with Redis, one with Memcached... (and so on so forth) gets non-trivial soon if you don't grow beyond managing it all on your development machine.[1] Suddenly, all that trivial development stuff becomes a question of configuration management. What the Ruby community understands is that trivial things can pile up into something non-trivial. This is why Heroku solves a trivial problem (deploying a process on some defined environment using git) and takes it to a big scale. Github does the same for repositories (arguably one of the "trivial" tasks for sysadmins) and provides it for a good amount of money. All those services started in the Ruby community for a reason. We love the mundane, as everything else is based on that. [1] Alternatively, if you are not consulting, multiply the trivial problem by 20 developers and a growing code-base.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
remote pairing with a graphical editor? yes please.
mangler 14y ago
60 seconds?! It took me at least 10 seconds of looking for a 60-second thing to work out that the shortest one of the things you can see that has some meaning is almost five minutes long. Am I missing something??
oz 14y ago
>Run specs, change database configurations and tail logs like a boss... That little tidbit made my day!
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I just filled out a survey they emailed me and the thing I indicated as being most important was an online development system to support remote pair programming using tech like Apache Wave or Etherpad.
northisup 14y ago
It isn't 60 seconds if I have to wait two weeks for an invite code...
vertis 14y ago
At the risk of being negative, I'm really sick of Show HN entries that go to a page where you can signup to a 'early access' mailing list but not actually get into the product and use it. What exactly do you have to show besides the marketing?
donny 14y ago
This looks awesome. Congrats. Just wondering, why do you pick browser as the IDE? (as a background, I've been developing iPad IDE called Worqshop). It's an honest question. How does the IDE perform using the iPad Safari? I thought about doing web-based IDE but found the performance very slow in my testing. Ultimately, it boils down to native vs web apps. Nevertheless, kudos to you. I know that doing front-end web UI, dealing with AWS, and provisioning the boxes, are not trivial problems. Edit: Just to preempt, yes, I know my app restricts developers to use iPad :) Ups... reading the comments below... you will be providing SSH access to the VMs
tbatterii 14y ago
the video is over 4 minutes..... just saying.
dinhhai 14y ago
action.io - awesome product !!
duncan_bayne 14y ago
For those saying this isn't solving a serious problem: my colleagues and I have just spent weeks trying to get a reliable recipe for a Vagrant dev environment that encompasses our interesting (and in some cases a bit old) Rails-based tech. stack. If we were starting again from scratch, we'd pretty much all agree to outsource most stuff: use Heroku, GitHub, etc. And there are several people intersted in Action.io now too.

210 points by iamclovin 14y ago

When I first saw the logo, I heard: "Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"

Interesting idea. If this takes off, I feel like it'll end up in every developer's toolbox. Nicely done guys, looking forward to seeing the product!

vasco 14y ago

Looks really good, I hope the rails beta goes smoothly because I would really love to have this for Django. Loved the demo! PS. Why not: on console focus-loss -> file browser auto refresh

raingrove 14y ago
Good idea! We are adding that to our to-do list right now!

3pt14159 14y ago

Wow, I'm actually pretty sold. One question though, is there delay when typing in the browser as there normally is when you ssh into a box? That kinda drives me up the walls, and I am an emacs person.

raingrove 14y ago
As long as you choose an availability zone that is closest to you when setting up the box, the latency will be minimal. In our experience with using Vim on our boxes, it was not a big problem. Emacs will run just as fine! (We aren't taking sides, I used Emacs a lot when I was doing Scheme.)
- raarky 14y ago
  can you migrate boxes between zones? in case you are travelling...
  - iamclovin 14y ago
    Yup! Also on our todo list.
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
SSH delays are why I make so many typos in IRC. It doesn't matter for chat, but for serious coding it would be absolutely infuriating.

nicholassmith 14y ago

It looks really interesting, but one of the things I like about standard Rails dev work is I can work offline fairly easily. Mostly this a weird 'I have a really long commute' thing, so I will be keeping an eye on this.

ajhit406 14y ago
Yeah-- we're working on a solution for this, so stay tuned. We're thinking that dev ops drudge work is going to go the way of sys admin (thanks to heroku).

benbjohnson 14y ago

The technology looks awesome but is this a pain point for people? I like developing on my local machine. Setting up an environment can be a pain but I only have to do it once. After that I forget about it. Also, it worries me to depend on a third party service and my Internet connection to get work done.

ajhit406 14y ago
The initial version of the platform will be really helpful to beginners, designers, and anyone who's a bit allergic to the command line. We're working on some great collaboration features and sandboxing that will definitely make it useful for power users. We've also got a solution that we're working on that will allow offline development so you can use native editors and can work offline. Stay tuned.

LaSombra 14y ago

Maybe that will give Cloud9 a run for its money.

username3 14y ago

email with a plus sign: "There was an error creating your invite, try again."

iamclovin 14y ago
Fixed, thanks!

jpastika 14y ago

I really like what you have done. Having transitioned from a Windows/Visual Studio .NET application development environment to an OS X and Rails development environment within the last year, this would have been very useful.

munchor 14y ago

I really like what you've done. Personally, not for me, I prefer programming locally using emacs, but I think it'll be great for lots of people, it also looks good, nice design :)

nanijoe 14y ago

I'll be sold when they give me access :) Seriously though, I have an old Laptop that I still keep around mainly because rails is "set up right" for some of my older projects

dko 14y ago

This looks extremely promising. Setting up and maintaining consistent dev environments are a time suck for any company. Companies like Quora are already doing this internally on EC2 (http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Quora http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Qu...).

moe 14y ago

This looks technically very interesting (how did you do the terminal emulation, is that an OSS library?). However I'm almost sure I don't want my Vim and terminals in the browser, there surely will be all sorts of quirks with copy/paste etc. Can the remote filesystem be mounted so that we can just hack with our local terminals and editors?

iamclovin 14y ago
Yes, that's definitely in our pipeline.
fishtoaster 14y ago
If you're doing things on your local machine anyway, is there that much benefit over just using heroku?
- JeanMertz 14y ago
  I guess full control over the VM stack is a big plus compared to Heroku

Argorak 14y ago

Hm. This is one of the rare times where a product actually does too much for me. If it gave me the ability to build and manage virtual envs for testing and development with ssh access (and maybe the ability to download them in say... vagrant box format) and nothing more, I would be sold immediately. With the glossy IDE finish: not my thing :/.

iamclovin 14y ago
You can completely do away with the IDE if you want and Vagrant integration is in our todo list for sure. P.S. Here's what Mitch (creator of Vagrant) has to say about action.io: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/215491864080547840 https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/215491864080547840
- Argorak 14y ago
  Saw the initial tweet, but I did not see the discussion. Vagrant integration would be great, as I am traveling frequently and need my offline dev environment. Thanks for the info!
mitchellh 14y ago
Creator of Vagrant here. Disclaimer that any of the comments I say following are my own opinion and do not reflect what the action.io team is thinking. I'm very excited about the possibilities that action.io provides. Additionally, I think integration between the two would be the best of both worlds, providing a CLI based interface and possibly non-web based development through my virtualization providers (VirtualBox for now, many more coming soon), as well as web-based development should you want it using the fantastic tools that action.io is building. We'll talk and see if we can come to a mutual agreement/vision. :)

wakaflaka 14y ago

This could be a really awesome pair programming tool if you could have real time collaboration ala Google Docs.

weslly 14y ago

It looks nice, btw I thought it was something from http://iphone.appstorm.net/ http://iphone.appstorm.net/, the icon/favicon is almost the same.

xutopia 14y ago

This is how Heroku got started and they quickly figured out that the editor in the browser was an issue. No one liked it.

iamclovin 14y ago
The IDE is the first step. Our vision is to provide a set of tools so that your runtime is on the cloud (but can be sync'ed offline) and you can use whatever editor that you're most comfortable with.
- davedx 14y ago
  Is everything going to be done "like a boss" or only tailing log files?
  - iamclovin 14y ago
    all the things
raingrove 14y ago
We are different in that we also provide a full GNU/Linux VM that you have direct SSH access to, so you are not limited to using the web-based IDE.
- rapind 14y ago
  That's pretty cool and reflects how I've been planning to setup for a while now on a linode via ssh. What kind of pricing can we expect?
drharris 14y ago
I see it as they made an early exit and focused on the half of their system that seemed more promising income-wise. There is still a space for the all-in-one market, and frankly it's wide open. Environment + IDE + Deployment in one place definitely has a niche.

drharris 14y ago

Wow, I'm very impressed. There is definitely a killer app for this, and that is Windows rails development. While it's better than it used to be, it's still far from ideal, and time consuming to set up. Love the idea of being able to use a consistent environment across multiple platforms. Great job; looking forward to playing with this!

heretohelp 14y ago

Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference in mindset. Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? I mean, the other end of the spectrum is to be focused purely on the obscure and utterly advanced, like category theorists trying to harness Haskell. I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. (The middle of the proverbial road) Meanwhile, we've got Rails (and I mean this separately of Ruby. The non-Rails Ruby community is much more like the rest of us) at one end of the spectrum, and Haskell/Clean/etc. at the other. What the hell?

localhost3000 14y ago
'...web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness...' says it all right there, doesn't it? You know what makes me a happy programmer? Building things, not mucking about with setting up a new dev environment (and filling my machine with crap) every time I hop on a new client project. Make the 'trivial' shit go away so I can focus on the fun/interesting/creative/productive stuff...sounds good to me. I'm very interested in a product like this where I can configure on the fly and keep my machine uncluttered. (seriously, it just feels gross to have 6 different versions of rails and 4 different rubies installed on my machine, even if RVM makes it kinda easy)
- johnbender 14y ago
  Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of swapping environments between projects. http://vagrantup.com http://vagrantup.com I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible collaboration.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  I have that already with my stack, I'm not sure you understood me.
Argorak 14y ago
This is their first iteration. For a simple Rails app, setting up Ubuntu an RDBMS and Redis is trivial, thats true. The point is that managing 5 Rails apps, one on Mysql, two on Postgres, two on CouchDB, one with Redis, one with Memcached... (and so on so forth) gets non-trivial soon if you don't grow beyond managing it all on your development machine.[1] Suddenly, all that trivial development stuff becomes a question of configuration management. What the Ruby community understands is that trivial things can pile up into something non-trivial. This is why Heroku solves a trivial problem (deploying a process on some defined environment using git) and takes it to a big scale. Github does the same for repositories (arguably one of the "trivial" tasks for sysadmins) and provides it for a good amount of money. All those services started in the Ruby community for a reason. We love the mundane, as everything else is based on that. [1] Alternatively, if you are not consulting, multiply the trivial problem by 20 developers and a growing code-base.

endlessvoid94 14y ago

remote pairing with a graphical editor? yes please.

mangler 14y ago

60 seconds?! It took me at least 10 seconds of looking for a 60-second thing to work out that the shortest one of the things you can see that has some meaning is almost five minutes long. Am I missing something??

oz 14y ago

>Run specs, change database configurations and tail logs like a boss... That little tidbit made my day!

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I just filled out a survey they emailed me and the thing I indicated as being most important was an online development system to support remote pair programming using tech like Apache Wave or Etherpad.

northisup 14y ago

It isn't 60 seconds if I have to wait two weeks for an invite code...

vertis 14y ago

At the risk of being negative, I'm really sick of Show HN entries that go to a page where you can signup to a 'early access' mailing list but not actually get into the product and use it. What exactly do you have to show besides the marketing?

donny 14y ago

This looks awesome. Congrats. Just wondering, why do you pick browser as the IDE? (as a background, I've been developing iPad IDE called Worqshop). It's an honest question. How does the IDE perform using the iPad Safari? I thought about doing web-based IDE but found the performance very slow in my testing. Ultimately, it boils down to native vs web apps. Nevertheless, kudos to you. I know that doing front-end web UI, dealing with AWS, and provisioning the boxes, are not trivial problems. Edit: Just to preempt, yes, I know my app restricts developers to use iPad :) Ups... reading the comments below... you will be providing SSH access to the VMs

tbatterii 14y ago

the video is over 4 minutes..... just saying.

dinhhai 14y ago

action.io - awesome product !!

duncan_bayne 14y ago

For those saying this isn't solving a serious problem: my colleagues and I have just spent weeks trying to get a reliable recipe for a Vagrant dev environment that encompasses our interesting (and in some cases a bit old) Rails-based tech. stack. If we were starting again from scratch, we'd pretty much all agree to outsource most stuff: use Heroku, GitHub, etc. And there are several people intersted in Action.io now too.