3 ms·

The industry tends to swing from one extreme to the other. Long ago we had dumb terminals and all our work was done on a central server. Find a grey beard and t

by josho 12y ago

The industry tends to swing from one extreme to the other. Long ago we had dumb terminals and all our work was done on a central server. Find a grey beard and they'll regale you with stories of VAX and other time share systems. Find someone slightly younger and they'll share stories of using notepad and loosing whole projects because their desktop hard drive failed. While today we have a distributed source control system, powerful desktops and powerful servers. I too fail to see the logic on moving back to running a thin client for development.

api 12y ago
Seems like today we have the best of both worlds -- powerful desktop computers that can easily back themselves up to the cloud either in whole via backup services or in part via replicated version control systems like git or remote drive sync things like Google Drive or Dropbox. You get the local power of a desktop plus the reliability of replicated managed storage. You can also easily connect cheap huge external hard drives for on-site additional backups that you control. So yeah, why? I see cloud IDEs as a product of a few years ago when "everything is going to the web." Today "everything is going to mobile" so you're seeing similar attempts to force fit everything into that model. The only rationale I can see for a cloud IDE is fine grained real-time collaboration features that work easily everywhere, but in practice I've rarely wanted such a thing. Having more than one person typing on the same source file is just obnoxious. Another use case I can imagine is people who are total nomads, but then again a Macbook Air or similar tiny laptop is pretty portable.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  Wanting to move things to the web is more about wanting them on multiple devices. If we had an operating system that allowed us to work on the same stuff on all our devices, it wouldn't be so big of a deal. Unfortunately, at present, we need a different OS and a different set of apps for every form factor, and even then syncing complex data is a pain.
  - ivan_burazin 12y ago
    Very well said!

by josho 12y ago

api 12y ago

Seems like today we have the best of both worlds -- powerful desktop computers that can easily back themselves up to the cloud either in whole via backup services or in part via replicated version control systems like git or remote drive sync things like Google Drive or Dropbox. You get the local power of a desktop plus the reliability of replicated managed storage. You can also easily connect cheap huge external hard drives for on-site additional backups that you control. So yeah, why? I see cloud IDEs as a product of a few years ago when "everything is going to the web." Today "everything is going to mobile" so you're seeing similar attempts to force fit everything into that model. The only rationale I can see for a cloud IDE is fine grained real-time collaboration features that work easily everywhere, but in practice I've rarely wanted such a thing. Having more than one person typing on the same source file is just obnoxious. Another use case I can imagine is people who are total nomads, but then again a Macbook Air or similar tiny laptop is pretty portable.

vertex-four 12y ago
Wanting to move things to the web is more about wanting them on multiple devices. If we had an operating system that allowed us to work on the same stuff on all our devices, it wouldn't be so big of a deal. Unfortunately, at present, we need a different OS and a different set of apps for every form factor, and even then syncing complex data is a pain.
- ivan_burazin 12y ago
  Very well said!