As part of the series of blog posts on developing using cloud based tools, I will today review Kodingen.

Kodingen

Kodingen was created to give developers a free environment to create and host web applications during development, and to prevent time being wasted setting up development environments.  This ethos is reflected in the large developer community that the company is fostering, with over 25,000 people signed up for a Kodingen account.  The site is still in beta, but is approaching a full release.

Even before you create an account on Kodingen, you’re able to create files and test code in the site’s Community section.  You can code using PHP, Ruby, Python, ColdFusion, classic ASP and Miva Script on the site.  There is no support for .NET, and the Kodingen team have stated they don’t intend to implement this in the future.  There is no concept of projects or solutions. Instead, you organise your code and resources using folders under your Kodingen sub-domain, with a number of default folders being created for you (httpdocs, private, and sub-domains).

Once you create an account on Kodingen, you are able to make use of all the available features.  And it quickly becomes clear that Kodingen is more than just your typical online coding editor.  The main features currently available include:

• Your own sub-domain on the Kodingen site where all your files and websites are located.
• Add additional sub-domains as required.
• Make use of four different online code editors within the site (Ace, Bespin, CodeMirror and YMacs).
• 1-click installation – you can install and configure a number of open source applications and platforms, including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
• Able to use a personal FTP drive on your personal sub-domain to upload files.
• Manage external FTP drives from your Kodingen account.
• Create multiple MySQL database instances.
• Upload existing web sites and files, and backup and download your work on the site.

All of the above are freely available, and the Kodingen team has promised that these features will be permanently available.  As the site is currently in Beta, a number of additional features are still not available.  These include:

• Support of common web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django.
• Add your own domains and manage them from Kodingen.
• Create and manage teams with other users to build web applications together.
• Support for SqLite and Postgres databases.
• Create and control SVN repositories (including Git and Mercurial).
• The ability to buy additional disk space, bandwidth, domains and sub-domains, databases and FTP drives as require, using various monthly plans.
• Add external code editors.

When the site does reach a full version 1.0 release, some of the above features will obviously be used to generate income to support the rest of the site.  The ethos of the site is to generate revenue from companies whilst keeping basic features free for developers.

What is it like to use?

The site is built on open source technologies, and has its own custom backend (KFM) that allows Kodingen to server over 10000 web sites from a single server.  Kodingen’s frontend is built on using the HTML5 canvas element, and is heavily optimized, resulting in an extremely fast, intuitive site to use.

To help you get started, there are a number of useful video tutorials.  When creating or modifying a code file, you have a choice of the four common open source web editors (Ace, Bespin, CodeMirror and YMacs).  The editors are fast and responsive, and you can view the resulting web page in either the Kodingen application, or in a separate browser window.  There is currently no integration with a version control system, but this has been promised for future releases.  There is also no code completion, so the code editors are more bare bones efforts compared to the usual desktop IDEs.  But as a developer, I’m very impressed.

There is a strong ‘social coding’ theme in Kodingen (use of personal profiles, ability to message one another, groups so that developers working on similar projects can interact with each other) which will only increase with the release of the team collaboration feature.

For the enterprise, there are a couple of major omissions.  It is not possible to use Kodingen with any version of Internet Explorer due to that browser’s lack of adherence to web standards, and lack of support for HTML5.  Also the current lack of support for Java and .NET, two major languages used in the Enterprise, will prevent many large companies from adopting Kodingen.  But this isn’t a major surprise – Kodingen has definitely been built by developers for other developers.

As part of the continuing series of posts on developing applications using cloud based IDEs, I will look at the CodeRun IDE in this post.

CodeRun

When you first open the CodeRun IDE in a browser, you’re struck by how similar it is to Microsoft’s Visual Studio.  The layout and menus of the CodeRun IDE will be familiar to any .NET developer.

This is not an accident.  The CodeRun IDE was designed to deliver a familiar development experience in the cloud, using the web browser.  This is to allow developers to focus on programming, rather than administrating complex configurations for development and deployment.

The CodeRun IDE supports ASP.NET web projects (Web Form,  MVC and Silverlight using C#), JavaScript development and PHP, but the majority of the features are designed to support .NET development (the CodeRun IDE is built using ASP.NET).

CodeRun allows you to upload existing projects, or create a new project using the predefined project templates.  The projects can be edited, and then compiled and ran in the browser.  Each project runs in a separate sandbox, but for a cost, you can deploy your project to a cloud hosting solution supplied by CodeRun.   The CodeRun IDE supports applications using both SQL Server 2005 and Amazon SimpleDB.

Other features include:

• Syntax colouring and code completion.
• Code compilation for .NET applications, with standard console output and error message support.
• Debugging that allows for the use of breakpoints, to watch items and inspect the call stack.
• Share code with others via a unique link.
• All code is private by default and can only be accessed by the logged in user, though you may publish the code if you wish to make it public, and you can also mark the project as open source.

Costs

The CodeRun IDE is a free service.  The optional cloud based hosting provided by CodeRun starts at $10 per month, rising to a maximum of $169 per month

What is like to use?

The CodeRun IDE is intuitive to use, and you soon learn to treat it as a cut-down version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio.  When coding, its performance is reasonable, though you occasionally notice a time lag in the AJAX enabled code completion feature.   Another nag is the lack of a toolbar for dragging and dropping web controls onto a web form.  Whilst it is derided by some developers, it is a major productivity feature in Visual Studio for the majority of its users.

A major disadvantage to the CodeRun IDE is that it does not support the use of third party code libraries.  This applies both to projects created in the IDE itself, and to projects initially created in Visual Studio and later uploaded to CodeRun.  The only way to include additional code libraries to the default selection provided by CodeRun is to add the source code to the CodeRun project.  This obviously prevents the use of closed source code libraries.

A further hindrance to adoption by an enterprise is the lack of integration with other cloud based services.  I would have expected to see some integration with online bug tracking and source control systems, such as Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Github/BitBucket.

The main selling point of CodeRun IDE is the ability to run and deploy .Net code from your browser.  But several other cloud providers allow you to deploy to cloud based hosting from desktop IDEs like Visual Studio.  Indeed, CodeRun also provide a Visual Studio extension to allow developers to deploy their own cloud hosting.  It would also be nice to see additional support for databases.  CodeRun should provide the ability for developers to create and use new hosted SQL Server instances from within the IDE – this is currently not possible.

CodeRun’s lack of integration for third party services, and the fact that third party code libraries cannot be used, means that the IDE is not a realistic development platform for the Enterprise. It is a useful tool for developers trying out code snippets, or experimenting with new technologies.  I can certainly see myself using CodeRun again, but Microsoft’s Visual Studio has nothing to fear.