[tyler-codenvy]

I am the founder of Codenvy, a type of Web IDE that is more focused on enterprise apps. We have found that the value of cloud workspaces has been around instant access and centralized control (for groups of workspaces). So, it is possible to offer on-demand, temporary workspaces without login (some vendors provide that including Codenvy). It tends to be a vendor choice as to whether requiring authentication before gaining project access is important. Most vendors do require authentication as it allows for saving important properties, user configurations, and some security settings.

To see some of the use cases around why cloud IDEs are used over desktop IDEs, we have listed them on our site. https://codenvy.com/why/cloud-ide/. The early uses have been around scenarios where configuration / setup of desktop are burdensome: pair programming, hackathons, training events, or partner integrations. We have some demos with Google, Intuit, and WSO2 that show what IDE on demand might be like, but those are special case scenarios.

As for the concept of downloading the IDE itself. Some cloud vendors do offer offline mode, and packaged chrome apps which do give that very behavior. It's first inning sort of stuff, but it will be possible in the future to allow offline sync of the development experience. Some cloud providers offer both build / debugger runtimes, so downloading offline, means also having a way to synchronize the project's files, and the underlying infrastructure necessary to execute the code. In a pure Web app sense, where it's HTML / CSS / JavaScript, this is fairly easy. But if you need to have synchronized access to dependencies, libraries, or runtimes, then the challenges are more pronounced.

Thanks for the cool questions.

[rhubarbcustard]

Just had a look at that Codeenvy page, it said,

"Developers Spend 13 Hours/Week Administering Their Desktop.".

That seems like an awful lot, 2 days a week on "administering"? Is this real data from desktop IDE users, if so then this is clearly a huge problem. What kind of things are people spending the 13 hours on each week that is saved by moving to a Cloud IDE?

I could see overhead if developers were constantly swapping from project to project to fix bugs and each of those projects had different set ups in terms of where the source code was stored, how it was configured etc.

I can't speak for other companies/languages/setups but using one of Eclipse/Netbeans for Java with Maven and SVN/Git is pretty low overhead in terms of configuration for me. For PHP we use SVN, SublimeText and pre-defined build and deploy scripts, which also do not have many pain points.

Genuine question: where is the 13 hours spent each week?

[tyler-codenvy]

It was a study done by 1200 engineers on LinkedIn and Electric Cloud. I think it was February 2013 when the results came out.

This does have a tendency to happen in various degrees in larger enterprise environments where configuration problems of the IDE and the systems you are building become costly to maintain. The way we think about it is that organizations have invested in DevOps technologies to automate the entire release process post-commit of the code. But that once the changes make their way out into complex staging / production environments, there are config + code changes that do not synchronize cleanly back into the developer's workspace. So, as the number of commits increases, and the size of the team increases, there are many more synchronizations that need to occur to keep development systems ready for the coders.

So the time suck shows up in mysterious ways: 1) Maintenance of the IDE install, especially with Eclipse which has had plug-in versioning & interoperability challenges at times.

2) Synchronizing configurations across teams, commits, and machines.

3) Collaborative / human costs, from the time spent in having large teams figure out the best way to operate & use their development workbenches consistently.

4) The environment problem, which is partly due to the production environment configuration is not exactly identical to what can be run on the desktop, so managing that in an automated way poses time issues.

[angryasian]

I do imagine many people feel like the previous commenter, myself included. For cloud development many of us use vim for browser based stuff like this I love jsfiddle. I really felt it would have been beneficial to just let me see and use the product without signing up. The product is very niche and serves a very specific purpose. The reality is if I really liked the product and had intentions of using it I would have created an account. I saw the sign up page and left.