Github is gearing towards becoming a cloud IDE, that is promising. Given their meteoric rise, and how well they perform, this will be pretty cool eventually. In a recent rant, I didn’t exactly flatter the existing raft of IDEs. And I think this evolution of GitHub supports (just a bit) my rant, that the incumbent IDEs aren’t working hard enough for developers.
People with fixed workstations, people who are using desktops that are seldom turned off or infrequently turned to other purposes, may not appreciate the value of having a svelte development environment. But the semi-mobile development folks, web developers, would probably rush to try out this new feature.
On a similar but entirely different vein, WordPress made blogging super easy and we all know the results, a massive success well beyond its initial target group. Drupal made web content management a breeze, and they are scoring big names quite regularly. PHP made web development affordable for the masses, this drove its widespread adoption. Ruby endeavoured to “bring the fun into development”, the results are there for all to see, an entirely fresh movement: frameworks like Rails, Sinatra (and Scalatra for Scala), Grails, Play, all were somehow inspired by the movement that Ruby created.
I see the current trend in Cloud IDEs taking a similar path to the technologies cited in the previous paragraph, some of the cloud IDE providers will eventually make it big and people will flock.
I now have my eyes on Node.js, that may be another silent(?) revolution in the making:
Imagine building apps with JavaScript, or let’s say Node.js, and HTML5 for example, using a Cloud IDE, deploying on cloud environments. That may be enough to hit a respectable 80/20 balance, where a lot of the regular functionality surfacing is quickly built using these technologies, the heavy lifting and differentiator stuff is built using the more traditional technologies. If adoption follows, or shall I say as people start reaping benefits (or just following the new hypes/trends), then we could be looking at a totally new development technology landscape.
Is this too far fetched? Who knows, I’m curious.