Cloud-based IDE’s
Microsoft has recently caught up with smaller companies, such as replit and codesandbox, with the release of github Codespaces, giving programmers the ability to develop software totally in the cloud via a web browser.
Online integrated development environments, cloud or online IDE’s are browser based environments, accessible from web browsers. No longer do programmers have to install their development tool on their computer — simply accessing a website gives them a “near-identical” experience for application development and even deployment.
By now you can imagine that I am a fan of online development, having used tools such as codesandbox, replit and snack for web, Python and mobile phone development over the last few years.
Two of the initial and most popular cloud IDE attempts were Cloud9 and Codeanywhere, developed around the year 2010. These days, a quick Google search produces myriad tools, including codepen, jsfiddle, jupyter notebooks and even Google development IDE’s.
Use Cases
There has been quite a lot of debate in online social networks, especially since the recent release of GitHub dev and Codespaces putting online tools and development into the spotlight, as to the benefits or use cases of online, cloud development. I have observed that while many users are for online development tools…
