Web Developers And The Chromebook

Lots of developers that are looking at the Chromebook think for the first time: “what tool do I (=the developer) have on the chromebook that will let me write code?” There are many options of cloud IDEs and we see more and more a good integration between them and other cloud services: Google Drive, dropbox, github etc’.

[updated May 2013]

• Neutron Drive seems like a good option with a close integration with Google drive and lots of languages its support.
• ShiftEdit – which give you many options to develop in your language: PHP, Ruby, HTML, CSS and JavaScript and then by using (S)FTP you can save your work to  Dropbox or Google Drive.
• Codenvy -Codenvy is a cloud IDE enables you to code, build, debug in the cloud, and deploy to your PaaS of choice. I’ve play with it and it got a nice collaboratively options. It’s support JavaScript, Java, Node.JS, Android, Spring, PHP, Ruby and Python. The environment let you do ‘pair programing’ with its screen shared capabilities.
• Cloud9, an IDE for JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Cloud9 uses the HTML5 FileSystem capability and AppCache to sync files, so you can even code offline. It got some really nice features that I find myself using a lot: github integration, chat, the ability to work and do reviews on your code without any pain of ‘new/other’ tools.

• Kodingen is an Online Development Environment including Code Editor, Cloud Hosting, Database Administration, Collaboration (not yet in beta), Web based access to file-system and it sounds good. I haven’t play with it (yet) – but I’ve heard some friends that like it.
• Codey – Easy to use code editor for HTML, PHP, CSS, JS. They are in Chrome web store.
• Akshell – Server-side JavaScript development and hosting platform. They got some git integration built in their IDE.
• eXo Cloud IDE – Full IDE that support: HTML/CSS/JS and PHP/JAVA/RUBY. The nice part of it is that it will let you develop in Java,PHP,JS and other technologies and to push your code to production on several cloud providers.
• PHPAnywhere is a web based free Integrated Development Environment or IDE for the PHP, HTML and CSS, in other words it is an application that gives developers all the code editing capabilities they need to develop web sites and applications online.
• On the other side of the scale – editpad.org give you a simple option to write in your browser and then save it. It’s a cool way to do stuff if you ‘just’ want to write something quickly without all the ‘IDE’ features flying around.

For just a quick demo or this new coding experiments, check out JSFiddle that will let you run your HTML/CSS and JS quickly and then share it on the fly with friends. In that region, you might want to see: JSLINT.com and JSHIT.com for your js coding and the fresh new ‘sister’ CSSLINT.net

Another option that is becoming more and more ‘like’ an IDE is the powerful Chrome DevTools.

Other JavaScript/CSS sources:

• MDN Docs – One of the best sources for javascript (ref, doc and all the rest).
• JQAPI – Excellent documentation for jQuery. Take a look at: http://jqapi.com/#p=jQuery.ajax and see its power.
• Less CSS – LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (IE 6+, Webkit, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js.

And for the ones that want a closer look to what the ‘cool kids’ on the block are doing with nodeJS – there is how to node.org and this free book on JavaScript.