Next Generation Eclipse IDE

by logn • 11 years ago

320 202 11 years ago

Just briefly looking at this, I'm very excited. I'm going to start playing with it tomorrow for sure.

I was optimistic that this was going to be a good alternative to my current VNC + IntelliJ setup, but I started playing with it with a bunch of real code, and I hate to be a buzz kill...

(1) the folders break all the time. And refreshing the folder list doesn't fix it. The hierarchy gets broken, and I regretfully can't screenshot it.

(2) where is the junit runner? One of the reasons I think IDEs are pretty great is that I can run single junits, and I don't see this working in any capacity.

(3) Why do I see menus for svn / git? What about hg? I prefer to use command line for source control, can I hide these?

(4) Is the timeout for the build configurable? I have a build that takes several minutes due to a large number of tests, and it is unable to build due to a timeout

(5) the auto complete seems very broken; maybe it is my project (using maven). It appears to import the dependencies just fine, but beyond that it produces a lot of errors.

(6) I thought this would have the eclipse refactor support, but I do not see it.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

I think you are usin the 3.x branch. We didn't expect to get HN or Scobled so early.

Would you do a couple things: 1. Check out the 4.0 branch. 2. Go into assembly-sdk 3. mvn clean instal.

Now run the next generation version. We are a few months away from having it fully stabilized, but many of the experiences you are seeking are in this branch.

We are running the JDT underneath inside of your workspace machine, and we have refactoring, debugging, find usages, etc in there.

stephenr8• 11 years ago

From that page I'm confused.

Is this an update of the "traditional" Eclipse IDE, or a new browser based IDE? What does a "workspace server" mean?

gravypod3• 11 years ago

Che is a web based IDE from what I have heard. The github site is better organized: https://github.com/codenvy/che

gherkin02• 11 years ago

a web based IDE

This is exactly what I didn't want. Please tell me that this "next generation" stuff is just inaccurate hype, and that this is really just some minor Eclipse offshoot.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

It looks to me like it's a web based frontend to Eclipse. I think a 'workspace server' is just a Java server passing messages between the browser and the backend.

voltagex_• 11 years ago

The API documentation screenshot is a default of something. I know I've seen that UI with those colours elsewhere.

nickysielicki3• 11 years ago

This looks AWESOME. It's effectively going to replace eclim.

I just hope the backend is thoroughly decoupled from the UI, and that appears to be the case from first glance. I can't wait to try to pair this with neovim.

edit: the more I look at this the less this seems to be the focus of the project. That makes me a little sad.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

We have worked hard to decouple the front end from the backend, which is powering workspaces, enviornments, and machines.

The client side can interact with any server side component over REST or web sockets.

is there a particular use case that you'd like some elaboration on?

johnhenry• 11 years ago

I wonder if anyone can comment on how this compares to cloud 9 IDE? (https://github.com/c9/core/)

jasonszhao• 11 years ago

I thought for a moment that it actually said "Cloud 9 IDE". Seriously, why does CHE look like a Cloud 9 + IntelliJ clone?

alttab3• 11 years ago

Because...

jakejake4• 11 years ago

I've only just messed with CHE for a few minutes, and I've only read the summary of Cloud 9. But from what I can see they are conceptually the same. Eclipse CHE is simply running your own private version of the Cloud 9 platform.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Different goals.

Che is focused on workspace portability and interoperability. As a result, there is a hard abstraction between the worksapce and the environments that power it. the workspace definition includes the definitions of the environments. This makes it possible to move a workspace that is bound to a stack of docker containers containing debugging, runtime, and compilation tools from one node to another node, and then the 2nd node can recreate the entire workspace.

Then within this workspace and the machines that are powering it, to embed industry native tools like JDT into it, and then place RESTful wrappers around it so that a browser or other tool may gain access to it.

The C9 goal is to build a cloud IDE and provide the best overall experience for developers. And Che was primarily a focus around workspace movement and interoperability.

jMyles• 11 years ago

Switched from Eclipse (LiClipe) to PyCharm in March of this year. Can be convinced to switch back.

Anybody done it yet?

vineet• 11 years ago

Seems like Codeenvy open sourced their IDE.

stephen• 11 years ago

Huh; yep, the commit to relicense it as Eclipse/EPL was 18 days ago:

https://github.com/codenvy/che/commit/db5b0bc2a1e2b4f3d7a7a2...

tuananh• 11 years ago

they also updated the project description link

jakejake4• 11 years ago

When you first launch Eclipse CHE, your browser window opens and for about 1/2 a second the browser window title says "Codeenvy Developer Environment"

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Hi - the contributor to eclipse che include people from SAP, IBM, Codenvy, WSO2, and Serli.

We started on it about 18 months ago. It takes a long time to get through the branding and legal process.

We believe that the 4.0 release in a couple months will have finally resolved the branding items and the remaining Codenvy elements will have been removed.

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

This looks like something that would be useful to me. As I've been wanting to have a decent C++ IDE that I can run on my server and access on any machine.

I've tried to use Vim+ctags over ssh for this purpose but am not really satisfied with the results.

jmcphers• 11 years ago

I do this all the time. You want the Vim plugin YouCompleteMe[1]. It integrates with clang and gives you real-time C++ code completion and linting, plus a semantic jump-to-definition that outdoes ctags for most symbols (though it doesn't go outside the translation unit so ctags is still useful for finding implementations).

[1] https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe

alttab3• 11 years ago

Rock on - I can't imagine how a browser would ever come close.

nickysielicki3• 11 years ago

In my opinion, neocomplete / deoplete are far better than YCM if you can be bothered to configure it.

My nvim init.vim is here:

https://github.com/sielickin/dotfiles_nvim/blob/master/.conf...

bobajeff3• 11 years ago

Yes I've tried YCM some time ago and decided it didn't work acceptable for me. It didn't find all the candidates for autocompletion and wouldn't work if there were any compile time errors.

Anyways, autocompletion and jump-to-definition weren't all I was missing. Smart syntax highlighting that could deemphasize macro blocks (eg. #ifdef) that would evaluate to false for the project is some thing could not find a plugin for.

rspeer2• 11 years ago

I'm wondering why the "meticulous design" still looks like an explosion in a GUI widget factory.

In the screenshots I'm looking at, there are dropdowns inside panels inside tabs inside more panels. There are five tab bars. There are completely unnecessary icons for "cut", "copy", and "paste". There's a "Subversion" menu and a "Git" menu at the same time. There's... a user switcher? I don't even know what that means. The actual code takes up like 40% of the screen.

Is this actually what programmers want from an IDE, or just what they have come to expect?

k_sze• 11 years ago

"40% of the screen is ok because EVERYBODY should be using dual or triple 4k+ monitor setups nowadays. Anybody who doesn't have 4k+ monitors doesn't deserve the awesomeness in our shiny new IDE." - Possibly what the Eclipse devs are thinking.

the84724• 11 years ago

If you have limited screen real estate almost all panels seem to be collapsible, making them open-on-hover or open-on-keypress.

And things go both ways: Some of us do have multiple 30"+ monitors and appreciate UIs that manage to utilize all that space.

Remember that responsive design doesn't just mean scaling down to tiny mobile devices, it also means scaling up to large screens.

stephenr8• 11 years ago

I think this is unfortunately why people get a bad idea about an IDE.

I don't want a tab or button for everything. I want to primarily write text (i.e. code) but I also want it to be intelligent about what I'm writing - i.e. I want the autocomplete, the parameter hinting, the type checking (i.e. can't use the result of a void method, or can't do string ops on an array etc). I also want the option to have refactor helpers (moving methods, renaming methods, changing argument order, etc).

I've found IDEA (and before that PhpStorm, but it supports less plugins) are generally able to meet that need but you have to be careful about which plugins you install. I want Lua support, that doesn't mean I want a Lua console button in all projects.

riffraff• 11 years ago

But eclipse (and I'm sure others) used to allow you to hide most of the stuff, is the problem just the initial perception?

sunnyps• 11 years ago

You should have a look at QtCreator which follows a minimal IDE philosophy. The only downside is that it's only for C++.

the84724• 11 years ago

Assuming it's anything like regular eclipse the UI probably is highly customizable.

It's more like a tiling window manager

You can choose how many of those panels you have and which tabs are in each panel and which buttons you have in your toolbars.

The actual code takes up like 40% of the screen.

considering that many projects still have guidelines regarding line-length (something around 80-120 characters) there's only so much horizontal space you can utilize. I can easily fit two source files side by side on my monitor and still have room for additional panels.

Is this actually what programmers want from an IDE, or just what they have come to expect?

The more you can have on the screen at the same time the fewer permutations of arrangements you need for different tasks.

If we are to extend the desktop analogy, it's a work bench with a wall of tools hanging in front of you, every individual tool within grasping distance.

buserror• 11 years ago

Well, I have 4 source window side by side on my 4K screen -- however I'm still stuck with a 3840 pixel wide console panel at the bottom somehow. WHY? Why do I have to sacrifice all that valuable vertical space for information that is always stacked in the 20% left side of that huge panel?

Mind you it's not just Eclipse, seem every IDE took their cue on how to do stuff from a VisualStudio from the 90's and decided it whas THE way to do it.

I still use Eclipse a lot (and Geany[0], for a lighter editor) -- the Code Indexer is the best I've ever tried. I can index the whole Linux Kernel in there, and it's a real blessing.

[0] http://www.geany.org/

babuskov• 11 years ago

Just press Ctrl+M or Command+M and you get into full-screen editor. I use this all the time when working on laptop.

aaronbrethorst• 11 years ago

Their "meticulous design" looks like a bad copy of Visual Studio 2012. It made me LOL a bit.

disclaimer: I was responsible for the shell user interface of Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, but haven't worked for Microsoft for more than eight years or used any version of Visual Studio later than 2008. That said, I'm still rather anti-Eclipse.

jeremiep• 11 years ago

I've once tried to look at the source code of Eclipse many years ago. It was by far the most over-engineered thing I've seen in my entire life.

I've since found out about Emacs and the contrast is striking; Emacs being a shining example of simplicity and extreme power while Eclipse is literally bloated boilerplate central in comparison.

This pretty much prevents me from taking anything coming out of the Eclipse Foundation seriously.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

We just launched a new interface at Codeanywhere this month, would love your thoughts on it! :)

jk4930• 11 years ago

Delicious. I have traumatic experiences with Eclipse from 10+ years ago when I was forced in a uni course to write GUIs in Java. We had 14" CRTs and this IDE cluttered the entire screen, leaving me with a palm-sized field to type code into (I had to scroll horizontally in it to read an entire line of 80 characters). We couldn't customize the panels (the setup was provided by the sysadmin and frozen). I never touched an IDE or Java after it again. Even today I occasionally think back to this time and laugh in horror.

markokrajnc• 11 years ago

How different is my experience with Eclipse... Diametrically opposite...

rspeer2• 11 years ago

The funny thing is that if you see someone's Web browser and it's as full of toolbars as the typical IDE, you assume that person isn't very good with computers.

Animats• 11 years ago

"I'm wondering why the "meticulous design" still looks like an explosion in a GUI widget factory."

Yes, the purple and orange lettering on a black background is especially painful.

I'm not sure what to think about a "cloud IDE" yet. It strikes me as the sort of thing which, if it doesn't work perfectly, will break in mysterious ways. When such things break, it's usually necessary to look behind the pretty graphical environment at vast numbers of text files, environment variables, and whatever other state the thing has.

andreamazz• 11 years ago

Yeah, the "meticulous design" made me chuckle. And they put it as the first selling point. "barely controlled mess" would fit better.

spacemanmatt2• 11 years ago

That explains a lot of why I have opted for a customized shell environment over IDEs nearly every time. I learned git once on the command line a long time ago. I have a REPL (Clojure) for prototyping and testing. I like to stay in the headspace of my own direction, without distraction from GUIs that typically try to shove too much canned workflow down my throat.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Hi:

Those were concept drawings. In the finalized version, all of the panels & tabs are removable. There is a "+" in the tool bar that will let you add / remove any button, menu, panel entry. This is in the 4.0 branch that we are working on.

frik• 11 years ago

Can someone write a comparision of Eclipse vs Eclipse NextGen, and against IntelliJ, VSCode, VS.

How is the UI latency if one opens a Java file with 1 KLOC or a 2MB XML?

alblue3• 11 years ago

This isn't "Eclipse NextGen", it's Eclipse Che. It's an open source version of a prior project that was well received (codeenvy).

Re performance I've seen demos of Eclipse Orion (another web based IDE experiment) where they had 100kloc JavaScript files and still be pretty performant.

grennis• 11 years ago

The hero banner literally says "Next Generation Eclipse IDE"

martin_• 11 years ago

When did PHP get demoted from language to framework?

stephentmcm• 11 years ago

Well to be fair it is a pretty good framework for building shonky code.

Source: Am PHP Developer.

sbahr001• 11 years ago

Since frameworks fill in "missing features" of the 95% php use cases. Php is better to get things up and running, especially for web. Web frameworks make programming for web really easy, which is what php is all about; they are complements. Also, you add a web framework like Laravel for example, which makes it easy link your web framework and your cron tasks together things get really blurry. PHP becomes less of a language and more of scripting a framework to do what you what.

erikb2• 11 years ago

PHP never was a language, actually. There is no language description, only an interpreter. So I don't know if it's a framework, but a language it's not.

spacemanmatt2• 11 years ago

It's a scripting language in the classic sense -- limited such that you could not write a real application in it, but useful orchestrating activities delegated to it. And like all classic scripting languages it should be replaced with a real language embedded or exposed such as Clojure or Python. IMNSHO.

ivantsoft2• 11 years ago

This is definitely the future

ivantsoft2• 11 years ago

This is definitely Eclipse future

dsz• 11 years ago

I give a try with docker, it works. IMHO both can co-exist, on/off line. Maybe in near future we can use tablets to develop.

stshine• 11 years ago

This is awesome, finally we can get a decent java develop environment in emacs.

hphuoc25• 11 years ago

Has anyone tried this? Is there any improvements in performance/code sense intelligence? Is is anywhere closer to Intellij IDEA?

jakejake4• 11 years ago

I've been playing around with it for about 15 minutes so far. Eclipse is my main IDE, so I would say I'm fairly a power user for Eclipse.

This is not a new version of the existing Eclipse (or Intellij). It's not a desktop app at all, it's a web server that starts and then your browser opens the EclipseCHE "web app." The IDE is merely a web interface - everything is happening on the CHE server (which would make the most sense if you install it on a separate machine altogether).

As far as the IDE, it's actually kinda amazing for a web app. If the browser chrome was missing it would seem like a desktop app (except the menus are in the wrong place for OSX). The intellisense doesn't seem to be working yet as far as I can tell. Maybe this is just PHP, though? It shows valid PHP code highlighted in red as if it were an error (edit - restart seems to have fixed this). I wish so badly that one of the dark themes for Eclipse looked this good, though. I've tried for days to get a decent dark Eclipse theme going - they all suck.

It seems that it may be creating a docker container for your project. You don't open local files on your machine (there is actually an 'upload' function to add a file to your project though). The files don't exist on your normal filesystem - they exist on the server, perhaps in a container, or just some internal folder structure that the server controls..? It seems to want to handle it all magically, which means I can't easily try it out on one of my existing apps. This is not really normal for my PHP workflow, but perhaps it would be perfect for those who have their app already in docker containers?

I can't get an application to run at this point. I have docker installed, but it just hangs with the message "Your request is queued waiting for a node to become available..."

Overall, it looks extremely interesting - especially for a team environment where everything is containerized. Just point a new team member at a URL - and the IDE and server environment is 100% set up, ready for them to start coding, debugging and running the app. There would be essentially zero setup time for working on your app.

diminishedprime• 11 years ago

Have you tried Solarized Dark for Eclipse? That's the one I like best when I'm working in there.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Hi: I am the eclipse che project lead & founder of codenvy.

If you are playing with it - try out 4.0 branch, it has the new designs & architecture which makes it near localhost.

What we are doing behind the scenes is binding your workspace into an environment which is powered by machines. You can either have a localhost machine or a docker machine. Right now each workspace can only be bound to a single machine environment, but in a couple months we'll release multi machine bindings, so that you could launch a docker compose, for example, as a way to bind your workspace.

The binding of your workspace happens behind the scenes. When you boot or shutdown the workspace, we take care of managing the machines. If you are using docker, then those machines are running out of process. If on linux we use docker natively. We use docker machine on mac or windows.

Once the machines are booted, we bind all of your projects into the workspace, which are mounted into the machines. Inside of the workspace machine, we launch another version of che. Based upon the programming language you choose, we are running intellisense services inside of the machines. For java, we actually run the native JDT code.

We then put RESTful wrappers around this, which enables the browser to have full intellisense capability. We have more work to do in integrating the JDT code with our restful wrappers and the UI, but it works well.

We now support refactoring, a lot of content suggestions, find usages, and so forth.

You can snapshot your workspace and use that image to load it again.

Your files are dual mounted between Che the workspace manager and your workspace environment. If you edit files in one, they are updated in the other. so you can ssh into your workspace or not. We provide a terminal into the workspace as well.

When you execute a command, we translate that into a process and then docker exec it inot a machine as well.

stuaxo• 11 years ago

Have they simplified the thing where you get about 8 levels of confirmation to do things?

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Yeah - make sure you work on the 4.0 branch.

But the intellisense is pretty seamless. We use Eclipse JDT services and have a lot of intellij-like experiences. so the experience is fairly similar.

roflchoppa• 11 years ago

next generation eMacs (previous gen actually)

melted2• 11 years ago

Because writing an IDE in a real programming language wasn't hard enough. <facepalm/>

thecatspaw2• 11 years ago

whats wrong with java?

hellofunk3• 11 years ago

I think many find Java to be quite inflexible and old compared to new programming paradigms of the last decade. It's much harder to get things done in Java than in many other languages due to how restrictive it can be (i.e. the notion that all things must be an OO class, etc). It is also not an elegant language, requiring lots of verbosity and boilerplate which tend to get in the way.

vardump2• 11 years ago

A lot less will be wrong with Java, once "struct" value types are implemented. I guess that'll be in Java 10? This should improve performance significantly thanks to locality of reference and reduce heap footprint in the same time.

Java tends to be "Star Trek Borg like" [1] in sense it's often impossible or at least cumbersome to use libraries written in it in non-JVM languages. When can we write a .so/.dylib/.dll in Java? There are of course some (cumbersome) ways around this, but it tends to involve RPC of some sort and multiple processes.

Not exactly technical reason, but a matter of opinion: The shadow of Oracle Corp. Makes me feel uneasy using Java.

[1]: Borg is an alien race in Star Trek that considered other species inferior, assimilated their technology and turned them into more Borgs.

annnnd• 11 years ago

In short: G<wait... wait... wait... ok done>C.

melted2• 11 years ago

Java by itself is workable. What I was referring to is adding yet another (and rather unnecessary) layer of complexity to an IDE which barely functioned as it is. That layer of complexity is the "web platform", which forces you to create UI out of divs, curse words, and duct tape to this day.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

I know a lot won't agree, but seriously Cloud IDEs can be very useful. Especially If you are a Web Developer, so if HTML, Node, PHP is you thing I would definitely recommend try them out.

Of course I am biased as I am the cofounder of Codeanywhere.com which is a Cloud IDE its self.

But just to make a point we actually built all of Codeanywhere inside Codeanywhere. Welcome any comments...good or bad :)

domagoj412• 11 years ago

Being cloud based is this "Code Anywhere", or "Code anywhere where you have Internet access"? The latter, in my case, would be "Code in less places than you could with your laptop and standard offline dev tools."

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

When was the last time you did any development without internet access though? I dont remeber the last time I did that.

fareesh• 11 years ago

Can you elaborate why I would want to use a service like codeanywhere instead of usual git workflow through my terminal app? Is this aimed at people who don't use laptops, those who don't use a DVCS?

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

You still ca use GIT and your terminal inside of Codeanywhere. We actually encourage you to use them, if you connect with your GitHub or Bitbucket account, Codeanywhere will list all your repos, so you can spin up a environment with them in just a couple of seconds.

Codeanywhere is an Editor just like Sublime, Atom and so on. It's just available everywhere and just how you configured an left it.

k__• 11 years ago

Why don't you do it like Chrome/Firefox sync?

There's one thing I really hate about coding and that is getting my environment up and synced.

This is why I would consider using CodeAnywhere.

Throw your IDE into Electron and make offline counterparts to the online stuff and it would be a nice package.

But writing a config sync plugin for Atom would be enough for many, I guess

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

You actually read my mind :))

stephenr8• 11 years ago

There's one thing I really hate about coding and that is getting my environment up and synced

Keep the IDE's config between reinstalls/new machines? Some IDEs even have a specific option to export the config and import it into another instance.

giancarlostoro2• 11 years ago

One neat feat of services like CodeAnywhere is definitely that you can go cheap on hardware and buy a Chromebook as long as it allows you to execute and test your code on the server.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

Yes you can...Codeanywhere works almost identically on a cheap Chromebook or a top of the line MacbookPro

vox_mollis• 11 years ago

What advantage do Cloud IDEs have over, say, sshing to your development host?

If the primary idea is to work remotely, ssh+vim+your toolchain should be just as serviceable.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

Well it give lets say a SublimeText users the advatage that you get using ssh+vim. Not everyone is a VIM user and not everyone wnats to be one. There will always be people that will stick with vim, but some people what the flexiblity that vim gives them but in a sublime like interface that they are used too.

slaxman• 11 years ago

Does CodeAnywhere support Elixir? I am writing a book on Phoenix. It would be good to use a cloud editor in the book.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

Not yet unfortunatly :(

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

Codeanywhere looks nice! I have been using nitrous.io for a long while, very similar to your product. Having an IDE in the cloud offers a lot of conveniences: large builds without heating up your laptop, easy to try different server setups, makes my chromebook and iPad more useful, etc. Of all the cool tech at Google, one of my favorite things was their web based IDE with very nice integration with Perforce, build systems, etc.

I don't understand the "must be on the Internet" complaint. As someone else said, other online resources are large parts of developer workflows - it has been a long time since I have coded without an Internet connection (perhaps a few times a year on an airplane, but I am happy enough writing (I am also an author) or reading on planes).

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

Thanks for the comment! I have hear of the Google Web IDE. DO you know if its still live and they is a way to see it?

Thanks again!

grizzles• 11 years ago

I tried it out. My first thought is, I wish I had downloaded a binary version. It was a 21min compile on my core i7.

Besides that, it looks very promising. The feature set is fairly humble, which is imo a good thing.

The best thing the devs could do now (they may have already did this) is to thoroughly document the server side API.

Most of the extensions I'd be interested in writing wouldn't really fit into the standard IDE paradigm, and that's what I think could be really cool about this. The ability to code an env (eg. in a seperate .html file) while I code is a very appealing prospect.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

Hi - I am eclipse che project lead and founder of codenvy.

A couple of things: 1. If you checkout che. 2. Go into assembly-sdk 3. mvn clean install

If you do this directory, you just download the binaries - will take only a couple minutes.

You will want to checkout 4.0 branch, which has all of the new capabilities and design into it. We have swagger APIs that you can access for all of the RESTful stuff. It should be at http://localhost:8080/im-api-docs-ui/. I am going to verify with the engineers and get back to you if the URL has changed for Che 4.

reitanqild3• 11 years ago

Interesting. Layout looks a lot like Netbeans, example: https://eclipse.org/che/img/che-lighttheme.png

MrPatan• 11 years ago

I use cloud IDEs, more for the cloud workspace than for the IDE, I guess.

Maybe I could have the same thing with VMs or containers (disclaimer: I've never even set up docker or vagrant), but I still would like to have that in the cloud where somebody else takes care of patching stuff, backing up data, etc, and I can share it with a URL if I want to, instead of with a multi-GB file.

I'm too lazy to care about my infrastructure anymore, and I'm happy I can pay other people to do it for me.

ivan_burazin18• 11 years ago

Love it! This is why we build what we do :)

lewisl90292• 11 years ago

Specifying a Vagrantfile and Dockerfile is usually the first thing I do for any non-trivial project these days. I find there's tremendous value in having a fully reproducible dev environment on all of the different OSes and machines I work on, and I suspect the benefits would be even more pronounced in a team environment.

The cloud IDE takes this concept even further by only ever having a single source of truth for the dev environment, but this comes at the cost of offline access and choice of editors, which is a compromise I'm not willing to make yet.

moonchrome2• 11 years ago

I like the general idea of this.

Considering how much of a resource hog modern C++ compiler is for example (I hear good things about Scala as well) it would be nice if I could use a lightweight low powered front end machine to edit code and then have the backend bother with parsing, compiling, etc. People do this already with distributed builds so why not make it baked into IDE with code analysis as well. Maybe the OS can even save memory if you run multiple instances on stuff like executables, etc.

What I really don't like is how developers are pretending that HTML is the only client side technology if you go client->server route. To me architecting this as a HTML app shows 0 benefits - the install time is irrelevant - I am a developer - I know how to install applications and I do this for all my other IDEs, the time it takes me to install a thin client is irrelevant.

All this "use JS/DOM as front end" does is either :

compile to JS -> introduce an extra compile step, a shitty VM emulation, worries with interop and leaky abstractions

use JS -> poor semantics

and both are abusing a layout model made for documents into application development model that gets really inefficient at rendering.

IDEs are at the top of GUI complexity - why make shit even more complicated by doing things that slow development down - if they would for example write the frontend in something like JavaFX (not having used JavaFX I'm only speculating here, but I heard good things) it would probably be equally good (if not better) and at the same time it would make development a lot simpler.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

I think Eclipse was slow enough before the JS/DOM thing came a long.

Back in the bad old days GNU emacs was written in LISP but it always seemed pretty peppy.

Today there are a lot of editors written in modern scripting languages and/or the JS/DOM environment such as Atom and Light Table and they all seem just a little bit laggy.

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

The goal wasn't to use HTML. Our goal was somewhat different. When I started Codenvy, it was after I had a pretty bad experience with developer tools. I had been offline from programming for 7+ years and lost most of my skills. When I tried to get current with maven, java, eclipse, tomcat, I was unable to get a simple program to compile.

I had a simple thought - it should be possible to let anyone anywhere contribute to any project without first installing software. you should be able to click a link and then everything you need is generated for you - the workspace, the projects in that workspace, the environments that power those workspaces.

Now, if you are on a desktop, you may want to wire in your existing IDE to integrate with that workspace. But if you are a product manager and just want to test some code, you don't want to install anything. So a browser experience is necessary then.

Generally, we have never seen the browser experience as the replacement objective or substitute. But it is a necessary deliverable for those who do not wnat to bother with installing software first.

Codenvy takes Che and is working to provide this sort of no-install workflow around a concept we call factories. You start in a private anonymous screen, click a link and everything you need to continue working is there. Really hard problem - that is what we focus on commercially.

But at the core of it, we needed a portable workspace server that had a web IDE. We chose GWT for the development of the GUI because of the cross browser portability and performance optimization. It's a brutal technology but we get a lot of nice optimizations. We have started some explorations to support Vaadin for dynamic reloading of widgets and have some partners who may help us with a pure JavaScript client, too.

We are embedding all of the language services within the machines that power the environments that the workspace is bound to. We use either localhost or docker depending upon your configuration. Since everything is within, the actual comms between browser and the workspace machine is limited. So you can get a pretty darn good expeirence. The file operations are localhost native, so we are able to process Java files with 50K lines at about the same speed that Eclipse or Netbeans does (minus the part of the file system being inside of the docker container).

noxToken2• 11 years ago

I've only used three different IDEs/editors with regularity: Eclipse, IntelliJ and Sublime Text. I've dabbled with others like Atom and Brackets, and you're right, they all seem to have a bit of "heft" to them - except for Sublime Text. It starts up quickly. It's closes quickly. It's always immediately responsive. What makes it different from the others?

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Back in the bad old days GNU emacs was written in LISP but it always seemed pretty peppy.

Back in the really old days, when desktop computers came with just a few megabytes of RAM at most, people used to joke that emacs stood for "eight megs and constantly swapping."

karussell3• 11 years ago

It is really funny how a very similar idea was in 2008 the April fool from Roman Strobl / Netbeans: https://blogs.oracle.com/roumen/entry/netbeans_7_0_plans_unc...

Already at that time I thought - why leave such a nice idea on the street? Others will pick it up ...

karussell3• 11 years ago

And isn't stuff like this extremely helpful for pair and remote programming? I like this and the self-hosted cloud IDE approach :)

stephenr8• 11 years ago

Remote/Pair programming is a feature of several desktop IDEs.

mrmondo• 11 years ago

Would be interested to see this working with puppet and test labs...

Nullabillity• 11 years ago

Trying to launch the docker image seems to make my laptop require a reboot.

Ubuntu 15.04, Docker 1.9.1

meshko• 11 years ago

Moore's law is going to stop working soon but humanity keeps piling up abstractions as if we had an infinity of computing power growth in front of us.

dschiptsov• 11 years ago

Even more bloated?)

cognivore• 11 years ago

What, it's not written in HTML/CSS/JS?! How antiquated...

Ciantic• 11 years ago

I've used Eclipse for PHP/CSS/JavaScript for too many years, it is still the only Open Source IDE than can do auto-completion, outline and Go to definition, Go to reference reliably for PHP.

But things have gotten to boiling point. It can't handle newer technologies, like LESS, there is no good extensions for anything relatively new.

I think Atom (and my preferred VS Code) is the future of IDEs, there is a lot of people behind these working on new features and extensions for these. And having HTML rendering engine behind the IDE does make it more approachable for hacks, simple and useful ones.

VeryVito• 11 years ago

I always opt for open-source when available, but after having used JetBrains' PHPStorm for PHP/CSS/JS/etc, I can't even pretend Eclipse is still a viable solution.

Although the community version of IntelliJ at PHPStorm's core is open-sourced, PHPStorm itself is not. Regardless, the productivity gain it provides is WELL worth the cost and inconvenience.

luisrudge• 11 years ago

really? che? as in che guevara? The executioner / mass murderer?

TylerJewell14• 11 years ago

as in Cherkasy, Ukraine, the city that originally wrote it.

mbfg• 11 years ago

How does one debug an application in a web based IDE? That would seem to be a pretty stifling limitation.

Next Generation Eclipse IDE

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