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Google Launches Project IDX, A web-based IDE (idx.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space to c/programming@programming.dev

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What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.

Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.

Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.

As a Vim fanatic, I can't say I'll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you're working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don't want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

It reminds me vaguely of Shells.

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[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is quite interesting. Is the devcontainer spec tightly coupled to VS Code, or is it something that other IDEs do/can support?

Well, to be honest, I have a Docker Compose setup I use with Neovim anyway so I don't know what the benefits are of devcontainer compared to that.

[–] realharo@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I think it was created by the same people as VS Code, and definitely designed around its needs (at least initially), kind of like the Language Server Protocol.

There is some preliminary support in IntelliJ - https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2023/06/intellij-idea-2023-2-eap-6/#SupportforDevContainers, but then it wasn't mentioned in the normal 2023.2 release notes, not sure if they pushed it to a future release or what. Either way, it's a work in progress there.

Then there are tools like https://devpod.sh/ that also use devcontainters.

Regarding how it's different from just using compose directly, I think the idea is that you "connect" your IDE to it and it specifies things like extensions (obviously IDE-specific), debuggers and debug configurations, language servers setup, environment to use when you open a terminal into it, etc.

[–] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I guess this is one of those things I'm not going to appreciate until I need it, but none of that sounds more appealing to me over Docker Compose. I'm not sure how debuggers, etc,. would even apply to the server or why you would need to use a cloud server rather than running the services locally for a development environment. My guess is this would be a lot more useful for Windows users who don't have as easy access to the right dependencies?

[–] realharo@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

The main pitch is that you don't have to spend time and effort with installing and configuring a project for development when onboarding new people to it, or when you want to contribute to someone else's project etc.

You get a proven, up-to-date "works on my machine" kind of environment that others also use, and you don't need to "pollute" your host system by installing additional tools necessary for each individual project. Compilation (and other build steps), running the project, running the tests, debugging, IDE configuration (e.g. language servers, linter plugins), etc. all happen inside the container.

I personally don't find it all that useful for projects I'm working on long-term myself, but it's nice if you need to check something in someone else's project which you're not that familiar with.

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