What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?
These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.
Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.
Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.
As a Vim fanatic, I can’t say I’ll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.
I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.
It reminds me vaguely of Shells.
Hell no, no way I’d trust Google with my code. Personal or otherwise. Let me guess this would work only in Chrome.
All your codebase are belong to us.
Hell no, no way I’d trust Google with my code. Personal or otherwise.
Ditto. But at the risk of playing devil’s advocate, if you were writing free software code you were going to stick on a code forge somewhere anyway, would you still be against it?
Are there Google services that only work in Chrome? I don’t use any of them, so I don’t know. I do know Google is generally less annoying than Microsoft in that department.
What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?
What if your dev environment could disappear completely one day when we get bored of maintaining it after it doesn’t immediately displace github?
That would be annoying.
this
What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?
No. Just no.
Fuck no.
These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity.
- Meta + D
- “vsco”
- Enter
Damn, I’m exhausted, why does launching an application have to be so hard?
CTRL + Tterminal opensHey, there’s always double-clicking the icon too. Now that is exhausting.
Meta+e … emacsclient pops up instantly
- ctrl + t
- nvim
- calls ambulance
I imagine they mean launching in more of a release sense (IE: Announcing the launch of new app XYZ). I sure hope so, anyways.
Probably, I don’t really know how a web IDE would make it any easier but perhaps that’s because of a lack of personal experience.
It’s selling itself as more than an IDE. The idea is to have templates for common languages/frameworks. Ideally, this would mean not having to learn how to init a project in a given framework, not having to learn the build tools, not having to learn deployment, ci/cd, etc. Just open this new webapp, pick a framework, develop, and click a “launch” button to have it spin up in GCP.
That sums up, I could use sensible CMake templates in my life.
Even if it’s very cool, the problem I have with newer google products is that they might just kill it at any time, even if it’s successful.
Basically if it brings them enough data it stays, otherwise, it dies. Look at Google domains.
I don’t see how this could be positive for any Software developer in the long run. I totally see how this could be positive for CEO/CTO, Project Managers, in the long run, and I see a few short term advantages for Software developers.
Let’s be clear, I saw that coming since Microsoft bought Github, and I am scared by the direction this is taking. The end goal is to move more and more control and power to non-software people about Software development.
By forcing every developer to not use their own tools this will have a lot of advantage for CEO/CTOs but this is terrible for software developers:
- telemetry: they will try to find a formula to assess who are the best performer in a team. And as with SEO, any formula could be gamed, the best at this game, will not be the best software developers, but the one that will learn how to cheat.
- global team tooling enforcement: vim vs emacs etc… ? Forget about it, the only way to work on a project will be via this unique allowed editor.
- assets protection: impossible to download the code on your local computer to use external tools on it. The only way to have analysis tools will be via these “allowed” analysis tools. This will make code analysis and experimentation a lot more difficult.
- Locked by promoting vendor-specific applications. As you will focus to make your code/app/product work only for Google Cloud for example, you will naturally use Google-Cloud-only features that will make your code difficult (or impossible) to move to another Cloud provider, or god-forbid, host your product on a non-cloud or private made cloud.
And I can think of other possible drawbacks but my comment is already long enough.
I mean, 2 and 4 have been true already for quite some time in my experience.
Google probably want that sweet, sweet development stages of the code, every interaction at debugging, documentation editing, everything, to train their AI.
So, like 18 months before this gets added to the Google graveyard?
We really should start a community specifically for bets on when a newly launched Google project will be shut down.
I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.
You can just push the changes to a different branch and then merge it to your normal feature branch later. Takes like 5 seconds.
Exactly. And if you you’re worried about dirtying your commit history with an unfinished commit, just rebase it out later.
but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.
Someone needs to tell this man about rebasing.
I rebase! I just don’t want to push to the main repo, pull it down, rebase and force push to it. Pushing to a disposable branch is an obvious solution I didn’t see, haha. I tend to not use branching a lot in my projects…
…I guess I could actually set up my desktop as a remote too, huh.
Huh, fair enough. I guess I’m still not using git to its full potential. What I do now is SSH into my desktop from my laptop and work on it there. It’s easy because I use Neovim.
“Hey you guys, come and use our totally free online thing. We promise we won’t use anything you do for our own gains! Pinky swear!”
Cloud is a plague.
No.
Aren’t we past that point?
VS Code is Electron based and it can even be deployed in the cloud. We are talking about one of the most popular IDEs.
You are talking about transmitting every bit of code you write to the internet. Go ahead if you want that, I don’t
I am not saying otherwise. But do we still have a say?
Yes. It is still entirely possible to run VSCode or VSCodium locally without any of that cloud crap.
True, I myself prefer VS Codium but how many people use it? And some site like Coursera have VSCode on the web and it can’t be changed to VSCodium.
My entire point is that you aren’t forced into using that cloud crap for normal development. And you aren’t forced into any specific IDE. You can choose whatever IDE you want unless your employer mandates something specific.
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Is it good technically though? Or is it just really popular because it’s so well maintained and extensible?
I think the main reason vscode is so popular is, because there aren’t really good native alternatives (e.g. I wouldn’t compare e.g. vim because it’s kind of a different target audience).
So maybe something like zed or so will take the reign of this class of editors, but we’ll see, I just hope it’s not yet another electron or DOM based editor, DOM is bad enough in the web already…
I just hope it’s not yet another electron or DOM based editor
Unfortunately, yes.
Mmh. Don’t like that
I think a lot of comments are looking at this thing the wrong way. This is not a feature that is designed to make things easier or nicer for developers. The target audience for this is managers.
Managers don’t want you to have a unique configuration for “your workflow”, they want a uniform workflow that they can just plug you into. They want to replace the unique person that is you with a corporate drone representation of you, as they have done with so many jobs already. When they can streamline your work down to " here is a ticket, push that button and you are ready to go", they reduce the rampup time of putting someone new into your seat to a fraction of what it was before.
You know they’ll be saving every line of code and analyzing it and feeding it into their ML models.
Fuck that. Anything I do is staying right here with me unless it’s something I choose to share on GitHub.
