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.
Probably, I don’t really know how a web IDE would make it any easier but perhaps that’s because of a lack of personal experience.
It’s selling itself as more than an IDE. The idea is to have templates for common languages/frameworks. Ideally, this would mean not having to learn how to init a project in a given framework, not having to learn the build tools, not having to learn deployment, ci/cd, etc. Just open this new webapp, pick a framework, develop, and click a “launch” button to have it spin up in GCP.
