This is not something very new but people are slowly switching towards cloud-based everything. Initially, our data moved to the cloud, then some of our activities became cloud-dependent and now that we have everything on the cloud, the development environment is also moving slowly to the cloud. I guess in the future, all that we would need will be just a fast internet connection to connect to all our cloud platforms and applications.
A few weeks back, I was reading about codespaces. That is when I realize that in future development would certainly move towards cloud IDEs and we will just have to connect to those IDEs online and work directly. I guess codespaces would come with a facility to commit the changes we are making online then and there. I haven't explored enough yet but most of the online IDEs that I have seen so far support the only client-based application support. I'm not sure how this would work for a node js code.
Even before knowing about codespaces, I have already used some of the browser-based IDE. It has always been very comfortable for me to share a piece of code with someone especially to even demo to them as to what I'm trying to achieve. When I give some tasks for my team, I ask them to do it on these online IDEs so that it can be easily shared with others. Below are some of the online IDEs I have heard about and used.
https://stackblitz.com/
https://codesandbox.io/
https://www.gitpod.io/
The first two I regularly use and I have also asked my team members to use. Gitpod is something new to me and it is on my list to explore.
I'm not sure how efficient it would be to run IDEs directly from the browser. For some of the projects that are lightweight this can be an excellent solution but for projects that have lots of dependencies and if the codebase is huge, I don't know how this would help. And most of the support right now is given only to the client-side frameworks and I have no idea how they can come up with a solution for server-side coding.
Currently, there are websites that support server-side coding as well but they are also not fully reliable. But it is definitely a great attempt towards the slow transmission. A few years back cloud computing and data centers were just a theory and the work was going on for that. Today we have full fledge data centers and cloud solutions for our data. Next is the way towards moving the development as well to online IDEs.
When the code is complex, I have had performance issues with the online IDEs. Not all the features that we see on a desktop IDE can be seen on an online IDE version. The restriction is quite understandable but ya I guess it will slowly evolve into a better solution in the future.
There is one good advantage here in using online IDEs, we don't have to maintain the code. I would like to list out a few advantages I see from using these online IDEs.
Overall, I feel that we are slowly transforming towards online or cloud-based development methods. The future can be fully dependent on cloud solutions.
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