Coding on Cloud9 
May 13th, 2011
I had the distinct privilege of writing a guest post for the Uber Global blog this week (They are the parent company of Jumba, who now host most of my websites). The post is titled “Is the future of coding in the Cloud?” and uses the new web-based Cloud9 IDE as a talking point for where web-development could be heading in the future.
I have been playing with Cloud9 for a couple of weeks while developing a new Ruby on Rails web-app for SU QLD. As you may gather from the blog post, I’m pretty impressed by Cloud9 and I’m really excited by what it signals for web development - coding from anywhere, at any time. But, not 12 hours after I submitted the blog post to Uber, Google had a guest blog post of their own, from non-other than the Lead Developer of Cloud9.
In the post, Rik Arends outlines some of the ways they are working to improve the offline capabilities of Cloud9 (so you can code when a web connection is unavailable). This is quite timely, considering Google’s Chromebooks announcement at Google IO this week - any self-respecting developer who wants to build Chrome Apps on a Chromebook is probably going to need a web-based IDE to do it!
But, it does shock me a little that it’s not Google announcing a web-based IDE. I have to admit that I always thought Google would be the first to bring code-editing to the browser. I mean, they have something like 10,000 engineers, who are all working on the next web-technologies. And, as I type this article up in Google Docs, I’m conscious that they know how to build a web-based text editor...
In saying that, I guarantee you Google are paying A LOT of attention to Cloud9, and I think Rik’s appearance on the Google blog is a sign of that. Who knows - and I’m just spit-ballin’ here - but, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google announced the purchase of Cloud9 and the Ajax.org team in the next 12 months. It would certainly fit perfectly into their ever-expanding product portfolio of web-apps.
The web is Google’s space and I doubt they’ll waste much time releasing their own IDE. Whether that’s a freshly painted Cloud9 or something brand spanking remains to be seen. Either way, someone at Google is working on this and I can’t wait to see it.
