Best online IDE and Development Environment!
Last year, I switched from local tools to online tools, and I have been using them since. The main reason for this switch is the limited resources I have in my laptops, and the internet connection that makes even cloning repositories a pain in the neck.
Koding : Hi online world!
I was in my fifth year of university working on an embedded system for my graduation thesis. Everything was happening in Linux or Unix based systems and we were building a Linux image for our system using open resources. We required a toolchain for our target platform, a bunch of opensource projects and a bare bone FPGA to test the prototype with real stuff no simulations.
There were lots of problems, but the main one (very stupid one) is internet connection, and the size of resources that we need in our project. Our school was limiting connection (for unknown reasons), the center or the lab that host the project has a bad connection (even I have a better bandwidth than them) and lastly we have to work together me and my friend.
In an internet cafe or shop near the university residence, while trying to update my CentOS and install some packages, I found Koding. Unbelievable website, you can have your VM in the cloud for free! I installed everything in less than 30 minute, the internet speed inside the machine was amazing, I spent the night working online until the owner of that shop asked me to leave for him to close.
Koding is not the only one!
Returning to our title “The best online IDE and Dev Env”, Koding is not the only website that provides these services, I tried lots of them and those who impress me will be in the list below. I will make a little comparison between them according to my experience in them and my twisted opinion.
Cloud 9
One of the best IDE in the world (for me), you will find in this tool everything you need to work on web projects, from configuring your environment to test and debug your code. With a free plan that include one private working space and an ssh (private) connection to any machine out there, as well as an unlimited community working spaces.
What’s community workspaces for me?
I didn’t know about it at first even when they mention it in their docs that you shouldn’t put your private information like app secret keys and passwords, …etc in these workspaces.
A community work space will be exposed to read only for anyone in the world, they can see everything you do in these workspaces. They copy from your code, and anything else. I is a very good way to teach people on the go :) don’t you think?
Supports Saleforce too
lately they launched a version for Saleforce developers with different plans from the normal IDE.
Cloud9 for Salesforce. The best you can get for Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning
They have an excellent set of pre-configured VMs and web development stacks like MEAN, LEMP, LAMP and others
And of course you can create your custom machine (even if it came with everything in it :) ). Enough about this one (I will talk about c9 in details in next posts).
Code Any Where
This one makes a code competitor to C9 in the number of offered options and the power of their editor, but they don’t collaborations between users for free, as well I hate their terminal (perhaps I am using an AZERTY keyboard), but it feels like working with Turbo Pascal in Windows.
You can connect different accounts from your google drive, github, Bitbucket, Amazon S3, Digitaloceans and others like FTP accounts, SFTP, SSH and Dropbox. Of course the number of connections is limited in the free account, and you can get more in the starter plan and so on.
About the containers or stacks, or machines. You can create Ubuntu or CentOS machines
Koding
The best thing in this website is the collaboration tools, like the one in codeshare, you can create a session with video chat and code with your friends. I don’t like their terminal though. And the resources are very low for free plans what makes C9 dominate the market.
You can see in the picture above (1 always on VM), that’s the different between this and C9, you can use your VM as a hosting server and link it with custom domain, unlike C9 which doesn’t support this at all (not necessary I think).
Others
There are other platforms like
Nitrous : They are hanging in there, changing their plans from time to time, omitting free plan then returning to it. I think they still didn’t figure out how to charge their customers yet.
Code envy : Directed to Java developers in the first place, they have a very good design and very clear to work with. They count with hours like Nitrous, pay at what you use with 20 GB hours for free every month.
