From @scobleizer, a new tool for corporate web apps.
“Today Application Craft (CrunchBase info on Application Craft) is releasing a new system that looks somewhat like Visual Studio, but is completely web based.”
Showing posts with label web ide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web ide. Show all posts
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Web IDE Part 3: Ephemeral Shells and Immutable Files
Thinking about this continues and there are some on-going conversations. My recently former boss is quite interested in these ideas, too. Here are some thoughts about replacing the UNIX shell.
Some shell operations are ephemeral. You run some command, look at output on the screen, sometimes maybe cut and paste it, then you're done. A trivial example is the date(1) command. You look at or grab the date string and that whole shell instance could go away. It's essentially stateless.
Other shell operations create or modify files. These are cases where you want to save the state for some later use, or just as some kind of permanent record. My first thought here is to give such a shell access to your files but to treat them as immutable. That means you couldn't modify an existing file but could create an entirely new one. Then, when you close that shell-like browser tab (or something), it will ask you if you want to save any of the files that were created. Only then would they be saved into the file storage system with some type of versioning, either with a modfied name like browsers do for downloads (Myfile, Myfile(1), Myfile(2)), or built-in versioning as in Google Documents. Documents' built-in versioning allows you to access the previous versions of the files, see the dates and times when they were modified, revert changes, etc.
Finally, for file storage, I think the Google Documents approach works pretty well. It has a sufficient level of organization, search, folders and organization, metadata, ACLs, etc.
See also Part 1 and Part 2.
Some shell operations are ephemeral. You run some command, look at output on the screen, sometimes maybe cut and paste it, then you're done. A trivial example is the date(1) command. You look at or grab the date string and that whole shell instance could go away. It's essentially stateless.
Other shell operations create or modify files. These are cases where you want to save the state for some later use, or just as some kind of permanent record. My first thought here is to give such a shell access to your files but to treat them as immutable. That means you couldn't modify an existing file but could create an entirely new one. Then, when you close that shell-like browser tab (or something), it will ask you if you want to save any of the files that were created. Only then would they be saved into the file storage system with some type of versioning, either with a modfied name like browsers do for downloads (Myfile, Myfile(1), Myfile(2)), or built-in versioning as in Google Documents. Documents' built-in versioning allows you to access the previous versions of the files, see the dates and times when they were modified, revert changes, etc.
Finally, for file storage, I think the Google Documents approach works pretty well. It has a sufficient level of organization, search, folders and organization, metadata, ACLs, etc.
See also Part 1 and Part 2.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Web IDE Part 2: Where's my UNIX?
The other thing I'd miss is the UNIX (Linux) command line. If everything is on the web, where can I type
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
…?
I bet you could run a virtual shell environment in a browser tab.
Finally (or at least what I can think of so far): I'd want to be able to write little tools, in Python or something, to do useful things. Actually, I think that could be done. The Bespin editor has a command line interface to the editor. You could just as easily put a shell-like command line interface there.
I think it can be done. It just requires some tools and carefully removing our work space from the desk top and re-gluing it onto the cloud. I will admit, though, I've seen clouds. They aren't hard and solid, but they're white and fluffy. Truth be told, they're actually quite damp and foggy, not something easy to glue to…
See also Part 1 and Part 3.
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
…?
I bet you could run a virtual shell environment in a browser tab.
Finally (or at least what I can think of so far): I'd want to be able to write little tools, in Python or something, to do useful things. Actually, I think that could be done. The Bespin editor has a command line interface to the editor. You could just as easily put a shell-like command line interface there.
I think it can be done. It just requires some tools and carefully removing our work space from the desk top and re-gluing it onto the cloud. I will admit, though, I've seen clouds. They aren't hard and solid, but they're white and fluffy. Truth be told, they're actually quite damp and foggy, not something easy to glue to…
See also Part 1 and Part 3.
Bespin: Web IDE
I'm interested in the concept of web-based integrated development environments, IDEs. Basically, that means writing and testing code via a web browser, without a computer in the traditional sense. That's because I'm thinking more and more about a browser-only, workstation-less world. The only thing I still need a traditional computer for is programming. If that can be moved into the cloud, then I'm free!
Bespin looks like an excellent attempt to this end. The video is quite compelling. The main thing I would care about in such environment is the performance of typing and editing. The demonstrated zipping around, effortlessly, in a 33-k line file is impressive in the Bespin video.
I think I can't write and edit code without Emacs, but the truth is I spend a lot of my time typing into browser windows and text fields just like I am right now. A lot.
Google Documents' word processor is also a pretty good model for browser text editing. The text entry is interactive and fast. Document saves are automatic and there's version control. With line-number recognition, a monospaced font, keyword highlighting (which I've now sadly come to depend on), and even typing help such as auto-complete may not be too bad.
With a button to run tests, etc., the edit and test cycle could be pretty nice.
See also Part 2 and Part 3.
Bespin looks like an excellent attempt to this end. The video is quite compelling. The main thing I would care about in such environment is the performance of typing and editing. The demonstrated zipping around, effortlessly, in a 33-k line file is impressive in the Bespin video.
I think I can't write and edit code without Emacs, but the truth is I spend a lot of my time typing into browser windows and text fields just like I am right now. A lot.
Google Documents' word processor is also a pretty good model for browser text editing. The text entry is interactive and fast. Document saves are automatic and there's version control. With line-number recognition, a monospaced font, keyword highlighting (which I've now sadly come to depend on), and even typing help such as auto-complete may not be too bad.
With a button to run tests, etc., the edit and test cycle could be pretty nice.
See also Part 2 and Part 3.
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