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

https://www.action.io/

by iamclovin • 14 years ago

210 79 14 years ago

action.io

freshlog• 14 years ago

When I first saw the logo, I heard:

"Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"

lucas3677• 14 years 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• 14 years 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

raingrove3• 14 years ago

Good idea! We are adding that to our to-do list right now!

3pt14159• 14 years 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.

raingrove3• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

can you migrate boxes between zones?

in case you are travelling...

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

ajhit4062• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

ajhit4062• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Maybe that will give Cloud9 a run for its money.

username3• 14 years ago

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

iamclovin6• 14 years ago

Fixed, thanks!

jpastika• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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-Qu...).

moe• 14 years 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?

iamclovin6• 14 years ago

Yes, that's definitely in our pipeline.

fishtoaster• 14 years ago

If you're doing things on your local machine anyway, is there that much benefit over just using heroku?

JeanMertz• 14 years ago

I guess full control over the VM stack is a big plus compared to Heroku

Argorak6• 14 years 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 :/.

iamclovin6• 14 years 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

Argorak6• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

weslly• 14 years ago

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

xutopia• 14 years 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.

iamclovin6• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Is everything going to be done "like a boss" or only tailing log files?

raingrove3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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?

drharris2• 14 years 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.

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

Why don't we live on the edge and do stuff in production machine? Environment, IDE, Deployment in one place (^_^)

drharris2• 14 years 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!

heretohelp10• 14 years 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?

Argorak6• 14 years 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.

heretohelp10• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135058

I just got done proselytizing the benefits of automation.

I'm not arguing against myself. I'm concerned with why everything Rails people promote and celebrate seems to be along the lines of what originally popularized the framework.

"Make a blog in 15 minutes!" --- you remember this one? Were you programming back then? It's exemplary of what I'm talking about.

Why are they accelerating the trivial? How many times do you really need to deploy a vanilla Rails app over and over in 1,000 different ways? There's much more to deployment than that, and if that's all your needs are, then there isn't much to say.

We should be learning new and advanced ways to manage complexity with Capistrano or Vlad the Deployer or some non-Ruby deployment tool like Puppet, CFEngine, or Chef.

Partly because they can help deal with things other than just the Rails app itself, which is the easy part generally speaking.

alinajaf3• 14 years ago

Serious response from Rails-land.

Though this project is interesting, it's not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow. There is a metric shit-ton of work being put into things that do. Over the past few years:

* The Rails queuing API (so you all queuing methods e.g. via Resque or DelayedJob have a common client interface).

* The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod).

* Profoundly, bundler. I dread doing anything without having bundler there to declare, manage and allow me to browse the code of all my dependencies.

So yeah, the stuff that makes the news on HN isn't where the goodies are at in Rails.

> 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.

:%s /Python/Rails/g<CR>

heretohelp10• 14 years ago

Rails volken: Do yourselves a favor, stop promoting stuff like this. It makes you look like Baby's First Web App.

I'd seen the Resque/DelayedJob stuff. The equivalent in Python-land are Celery and Carrot. They're probably not much different.

>* The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod).

Creating defaults for this stuff is definitely cool, but OTOH, it's something we solved at my company with a single bash script ;)

>:%s /Python/Rails/g<CR>

Vim user. Pffffft. ;) All hail the hypno-Emacs!

>it's [action.io] not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow

I would hope not. I would think most serious programmers have a pretty smooth/fine-tuned pipeline for "save file, run script, see changes in $SERVER(s)"

lominming• 14 years ago

I am from the Rails-land, but I think what action.io is solving is something that all developers face in general - setting up a local development environment is a pain. Think about it, you cannot easily have multiple Ruby versions in your own local box. Or even having multiple versions of databases in my own local machine is a pain. A lot of people ended up running virtual machines just to have different server configurations. I think action.io does it nicely to solve this problem.

I think action.io is going to help a lot in the case of trying out the latest versions of a framework before migration. Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out.

I see huge benefits in the open-source community tool. There are so many different open-source projects out there, but the last thing I want to do is to spend 30min (or more) messing with my local development environment just to try out and play around with a open source project.

Cool stuff man.

charliesome• 14 years ago

> Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out.

    rvm 1.9.3
    gem install rails

It doesn't get much simpler than that

localhost3000• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of swapping environments between projects.

http://vagrantup.com

I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible collaboration.

heretohelp10• 14 years ago

I have that already with my stack, I'm not sure you understood me.

phillmv• 14 years ago

>Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial?

That's easy. That's a false dichotomy. This isn't a deeply held cultural value.

>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.

It is a Ruby cultural value that There's More Than One Way To Do It, and that shiny things are worth chasing.

That said, I laugh in the face of your "Python cleanliness".

marcamillion• 14 years ago

Wow...I can't believe this comment is the first in the thread.

HN is not about technical purity...it's about hackers getting shit done.

You may think that getting a 'vanilla' Rails App deployed to the cloud and being able to do editing in your browser is trivial - because you have invested a ton of work in your own setup and you are entitled to that.

But when did HN become a place where on the thread announcing a major achievement - the shipping of what seems like a damn good product, that may solve a pain point for many people - people are shitting all over it because of some language/community war? Really?

I am a Rails developer, sure...I may not have as much experience as you do building web apps or even programming, but anything that removes the friction of me getting a product out the door is perfect.

While I can't say I would necessarily pay for this immediately, but I can see it having immense value.

As someone that has wrestled with getting Rails setup on various operating systems for people that aren't Rails developers but need access to the source, like a front-end dev that only uses Windows for instance, having something like this is pretty awesome.

I can just push my app here and the front-end dev can edit the code in the browser....without having to worry about installing Rails (or even having the app installed) locally.

I am sure many other people think that this looks like an awesome product - hence the many upvotes.

I just don't understand how this comment got so much attention and how, after scrolling through many replies, I haven't seen someone address this issue.

This is HN. Hacker News. For Hackers. By Hackers.

Not Ruby land. Not Python land. Not Computer Science land. Sure, we all talk about those stuff.

But our #1 focus is on people that get shit done.

These guys have done so.

Congrats. The product looks kick-ass.

I await my trial.

sparknlaunch• 14 years ago

> Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial?

From a Rails beginner perspective...

Having spent days trying to get Rails up and running on a Windows box, this product looks absolutely awesome.

Even the so called out of the box solutions still needs hours of customization. Every new release of Rails means starting from scratch with limited documentation.

Anyone who has struggled with installing Rails on Windows, then finding a decent IDE, installing all the other packages etc etc will appreciate being able to get to that point in 60 seconds via their browser.

I am sure some Rails experts and Mac Users may disagree but getting started in Rails takes a lot of effort.

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

remote pairing with a graphical editor?

yes please.

mangler• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

>Run specs, change database configurations and tail logs like a boss...

That little tidbit made my day!

mark_l_watson• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

vertis• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

dinhhai• 14 years ago

action.io - awesome product !!

duncan_bayne• 14 years 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.

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

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