Cloud Hosting

Editing JavaScript in the Cloud 9 IDE.

The Cloud 9 Web-based development platform has launched a major update. The new version brings several noteworthy new features like collaborative code editing and offline support. The service has also been enhanced with broader support for running code on the Cloud 9 servers.

Cloud 9 aims to give developers a complete browser-based integrated development environment (IDE). The tool includes project management and version control functionality as well as a sophisticated interactive code editor. Its literally a hosted IDE that loads in a browser tab.

It is designed to integrate tightly with source code repository sites GitHub and BitBucket, making it easy for developers to clone, edit, and push code without ever having to download it to their local filesystem. The concept is ambitious, but delivering an implementation that is fully competitive with native development tooling on the desktop is obviously a major challenge.

For some kinds of projects, Cloud 9 is surprisingly close to achieving feature parity with conventional development environments. It is already well-suited for Node.js programming, an area that was a major focus for the company. The latest improvements will help to make it more viable for additional languages and development frameworks.

The editing experience is largely what you would expect to get in a programming text editor, offering features like syntax highlighting and optional support for Vim key bindings. But Cloud 9 aspires to be more than just an editor. The goal is to allow users to run their code on the server itself so that they can conduct testing during development without having to deploy to a separate test environment.

Cloud 9 is capable of executing Node.js applications on the server side, with full support for breakpoint-based debugging in the Cloud 9 editor. The new version of Cloud 9 has been extended to support running PHP and Ruby code in addition to Node.js projects.

We discussed the new functionality with Ruben Daniels, one of the cofounders of Cloud 9. In order to support server-side code execution, he explained, the Cloud 9 backend was rebuilt so that users would have their own isolated virtualized environment on the server. The new version of Cloud 9 also has a built-in terminal interface that allows users to get full shell access to the remote VM.

In addition to improved support for code execution, Cloud 9 has also gained a number of other new features. The latest version supports real-time collaborative editing in the browserallowing multiple developers to edit the same file at the same time. The experience is a bit like collaborative editing in tools like Google Docs or SubEthaEdit.

Another major new feature is support for offline editing, which allows the user to continue working without an Internet connection. Unlike most of the functionality in Cloud 9, this particular feature requires users to install and run a special client application on their computer that can handle synchronization between the local filesystem and the cloudexisting offline storage mechanisms in browsersaren'tquite up to the task yet.

The rest is here:
Cloud 9 browser-based development environment gets tricked out