Project Orion, moving the eclipse IDE to the cloud

I understand that most folks around here swear by VS of some flavor. IMO, you'd benefit from checking the other side (tm), at http://eclipse.org. (Yes, it might be not as polished as VS, but have you seen the ecosystem)

Here is something i'm waiting for (in order to buy a chromebook ):

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Orion

I don't know about "polished", but a simple java project I tried gave me serious text rendering issues in the code window, and sent me running to JetBrains' IntelliJ. ecosystem is nice, but fix the basics!

Not sure…

It's a nice idea, but I can't see anything here that's going to make switch from IntelliJ IDEA.

So if I have low bandwidth, can I still work efficiently, or does it assume that the whole world has 8Mbit connections?

Herbie

I wonder if VS will go down this route, with HTML 5 and JS there is nothing stopping it from being as rich as Desktop.  Having 256 cores compiling your code sounds appealing.  Regarding the bandwith issue, there shouldnt be much traffic once the ui is loaded, just text.

I think the whole idea is summed up by pretty much two moments, the first being the slide which gives the reasons why they think a browser based dev environment is a good idea, which contains just an "everything else is web based" argument. The second being towards the end when extolling the virtues of a browser based tool and he says, without a hint of irony, "if my laptop broke I could just borrow a laptop and show you this demo on that, if the internet was working"

It falls into the classic trap of thinking that to get the benefits of the web you need to be browser based. We really ought to have moved past that stage now, smartphones have demonstrated to everyone that people prefer the smart-client approach pretty much universally. It's just not necessary to lose the benefits of rich local applications in order to gain the main benefits of online tools.

I have used Eclipse and Visual Studio.   Eclipse is horrible from a user perspective and I do not understand why anyone would want to use it ..

@TomboRombo: Eclipse if good for beginners or just graduated developers. Once you have been programming for a decade then you still love eclipse, but adore Visual Studio

You are comparing a Mini Cooper with a Ferrari

@AndyC:

I think you are missing the point, with the browser version you could borrow you friends laptop/tablet/phone or any device that has a browser (most), regardless of the OS.  With rich local apps they are usually tied to a particular platform and also need to be installed.

That is what the whole cloud/browser as an OS is all about, reaching every device.

32 minutes ago,AndyC wrote

I think the whole idea is summed up by pretty much two moments, the first being the slide which gives the reasons why they think a browser based dev environment is a good idea, which contains just an "everything else is web based" argument. The second being towards the end when extolling the virtues of a browser based tool and he says, without a hint of irony, "if my laptop broke I could just borrow a laptop and show you this demo on that, if the internet was working"

It falls into the classic trap of thinking that to get the benefits of the web you need to be browser based. We really ought to have moved past that stage now, smartphones have demonstrated to everyone that people prefer the smart-client approach pretty much universally. It's just not necessary to lose the benefits of rich local applications in order to gain the main benefits of online tools.

AndyC, I'm a little puzzled here. I would die for a browser-based IDE. Just think of the integration with the web: easily getting libraries and documentation, getting snippets faster and up to date, better search etc. Granted, all these exist today, but I feel they'd be better. Also if the sites he mentioned in the talk, beautifiers, linters, tutorials, and the rest, if they could be integrated to the IDE, it would be even better. Also a multiuser experience like in Google docs with chat etc, would also be a killer. And yet you say yawn. I just don't get it.

BTW, his comment you quoted about if a computer breaks, is on the mark. It seems whenyour laptop breaks, you'd rather install the OS, the IDE, SCCS of some sort, connect to your repository, download the project and dependencies, and i may have forgotten some steps

@TomboRombo and @vesuvius:

It seems you suffer form the SteveB syndrome. Remember how he mocked the iPhone, and was puzzled by the fact that Google has two OSs?

I would also bet you make fun of Java (who can use that old fashion crap, no real generics) or objective c (isn't that from the 80s), HTML/JS/CSS (i'd rather poke my eyes etc.), Linux (what, no point-n-click administration), and i'm sure i missed some. I'm not advocating learning everything under the sun, but thinking that everything Microsoft is the greatest, you might one day find that you are left behind.

How would a browser-based IDE handle advanced features like Intellisense which need to be fast and have the context of the entire codebase?

(I haven't watched the presentation yet, due to very low bandwidth at work)

Herbie

@Dr Herbie: I don't know, but think of Google instant, intelisense for the net

@fanbaby:I used Eclipse on a project involving VxWorks.  I enjoy Java but use the Netbeans environment for that.   I am not even mocking the iphone. So do not make too many assumptions on my viewpoint.   I think Eclipse tries to be too much for everyone to plug into.   What you get is a tool that is not great at any particular thing but has alot of flexibility.   It does not make for a refined tool.  Most everyone I work with has the same opinion.  They prefer Microsoft Visual Studio for development as of right now.   It is focused in on creating the best enviroment for the developer.   The eclipse IDE is clumsy and less powerful.  I am not religious and will change to the best tool.  I even remember when Borland made the best IDE  before Microsoft even knew what an IDE was.  Microsoft makes plenty of mistakes.   I don't think their  Metro strategy is sound yet and we will see how it works out.  So my opinion of Eclipse is not from suffering from any syndrome.

53 minutes ago,fanbaby wrote

*snip*

AndyC, I'm a little puzzled here. I would die for a browser-based IDE. Just think of the integration with the web: easily getting libraries and documentation, getting snippets faster and up to date, better search etc. Granted, all these exist today, but I feel they'd be better. Also if the sites he mentioned in the talk, beautifiers, linters, tutorials, and the rest, if they could be integrated to the IDE, it would be even better. Also a multiuser experience like in Google docs with chat etc, would also be a killer. And yet you say yawn. I just don't get it.

Have you used Visual Studio in the last 5 years? It already does most of that and yet provides a vastly richer experience than anything you can find in the browser. And the next version even has full intellisense for Javascript, which the Orion guy pretty much dismisses as being an impossible goal.

I'm not saying the online bit is "yawn", I'm saying you don't need to be constrained to trying to work within a web-page model, constrained by what a browser provides, in order to gain any of the productivity benefits online functionality can offer. And you certainly shouldn't have to give up all the benefits of a local rich client to get some online functionality.

BTW, his comment you quoted about if a computer breaks, is on the mark. It seems whenyour laptop breaks, you'd rather install the OS, the IDE, SCCS of some sort, connect to your repository, download the project and dependencies, and i may have forgotten some steps

Did you miss the "if the internet was working" bit? The only reason he could do his presentationat all was because he'd already downloaded and set up a completely local copy of the whole environment. Everyone in that room could have lent him a laptop and he'd still not have gotten anywhere. That's such an epic fail when trying to convince the world they should use a browser based tool that it's not even funny.

Eclipse must be the buggiest software I've used in years. When you start working with large and complex projects, things just start to fall apart. It keeps running out of memory, projects randomly fail to compile, forcing you to restart Eclipse. Sometimes your project compiles with no errors, you then make a change that causes complier errors, you undo the change, and yet the project no longer wants to compile, no matter what you do. Once again, you need to restart Eclipse.

Or the project fails to compile, you go to the location where it claims the error is (this in a file that you haven't even checked out yet), but as far as you can see, there is no error. So what do you have to do? Make a dummy edit somewhere in the general vicinity of this phantom "error", undo the change and then recompile. Now it suddenly starts working again.

And don't get me started on all the bizarre error messages. Like the classic we get from time to time: "An internal error occurred while trying to display an error" (paraphrasing).

And yes, the ecosystem is pretty extensive and useful when it works. Example:

We needed the ability to consume a web service in Java (create stubs from WSDL at compile time given a web service URL), and for a test service I used ServiceHost .Net 4.0. It took me literally 20 minutes tops to create the service in .Net that exposed a simple Hello World method.

Then I searched around for a way to consume the web service in Java, and initially settled on Axis2. After a huge amount of effort and hair-pulling, we discovered that the reason things just didn't work was because there was a bug in the Axis2 OSGi bundle and some dependencies were not properly included (Eclipse tries hard to make it easy to manage dependencies and versioning but when things go wrong...). The whole point of an OSGi bundle is to be a self-contained bundle that can resolve all dependencies.

Eventually we gave up on Axis2 and went to CXF. After we got that figured out and the project in Eclipse configured to automatically pull in the WSDL and create the stubs at compile time, things started to work better. However the amount of code that was automatically generated from the WSDL was mind-boggling. Not that it really matters but compare to what you get with WCF. Also using the service in Java is not straight-forward, as the structures you exposed in the service are wrapped in special classes.

So yes, the "ecosystem" is pretty extensive, but in many cases those bases are already covered pretty well (e.g, WCF) when using VS and you don't need to relay on flaky external libraries.

EDIT: I didn't watch the presentation because I find attempts to move everything into the browser to be boring, pointless and a huge step backwards. But I have to wonder, was it explained how moving something as complex as Eclipse "into the cloud" is going work any better when Eclipse can barely function as a native application right now? Was it explained? And what about things like multiple monitor support, etc?

1 hour ago,AndyC wrote

Did you miss the "if the internet was working" bit? The only reason he could do his presentationat all was because he'd already downloaded and set up a completely local copy of the whole environment. Everyone in that room could have lent him a laptop and he'd still not have gotten anywhere. That's such an epic fail when trying to convince the world they should use a browser based tool that it's not even funny.

Oh, you meant that! I don't know about you, but myself, without the net i feel naked. What part of: the net is just another utility, don't you get?

I don't think he was trying to convince anyone to use a web-based IDE, and I don't think anyone cared about the fact there was no net. They were eager, as I am, to get something working. The list of native-only apps is getting shorter I think, and EVREYONE, including the presenter and Microsoft, is working towards that holy grail.

@fanbaby:

So can you give me a simple answer to this question: Do you believe the current Eclipse experience would become better or worse when it is shoved into a browser?