CoderBuddy, Napster investor's free Web IDE for Python & sites on App Engine | Hacker News Reader

CoderBuddy, Napster investor's free Web IDE for Python & sites on App Engine

coderbuddy.com

51 pointsadrianscott29 comments

Hi, we wanted to invite a few of you into our private beta. This is still an early version of our product, but hopefully there's enough functionality that some will find useful.

CoderBuddy is free for commercial, non-commercial and open source projects.

There were a few posts on HN about having a web-based way to use Google App Engine for static sites, and that's one thing you can do with CoderBuddy.

You can build and publish web-based applications in Python on Google App Engine. CoderBuddy comes with an instantly updating test environment and integrated publishing to App Engine. we're starting to roll out a more advanced editor, the 'New Editor (beta)' link with tabs.

We invite your suggestions of who we should test this out with, and your top 3 feature requests. We've tried to make it really easy for someone to get started coding and publishing. We'd also love to hear from folks giving workshops soon who might want to try this out there.

Thanks, -Adrian (Napster founding investor, founder of social networking pioneer Ryze)

I was contemplating writing a site for appengine/python so I immediately jumped at trying this out. My biggest concern was that I wanted to be able to download the code when I was done, so I was glad to see it was an option to do just that. My ideal would be making that a git repository I could push or pull from. I also tried to use the site in Opera. I understand it's probably not common, but both editors seem to be broken. I think it would be a really good idea for this IDE to optionally integrate with webapp and hide away some of the framework-specific boilerplate behind slick interfaces.

Hi, thanks for the suggestion re interfaces and such, that sounds cool.

I've been able to reproduce problems with the new editor in my copy of Opera, but our classic editor is working fine for me. We'll investigate this more and see what we can do -- thanks for reporting it!

And yeah, we'd like to add more git support over time! ;)

Thanks,

What's the benefit here? App Engine already has a downloadable dev environment that gives you everything you need and is instantly updating as well. You can use the App Engine Launcher [0] to test multiple sites locally and then deploy to GAE. Best of all, you can operate at local speeds using an editor you're already comfortable with and it works even if you're sitting in a lead bunker with no connectivity.

What am I missing?

[0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/05/app-engine-launc...

Thanks, that's a relevant question. There are the overall benefits of moving to the cloud (as one experiences in gmail, google docs, etc.). Specifically in CoderBuddy, the benefits right now, which are going to be more valuable to some folks than others can include:

- quick accessibility, nothing to download, install and configure (especially useful for folks who've been meaning to play w/ App Engine for a while but haven't gotten around to it, and also folks who are newer to web application programming in general -- something we've seen in tests with workshops)

- cloud backup

- easy accessibility of code from different machines

- collaboration with multiple developers (you can add developers to a project)

As we build out the application and start growing a community, there'll be more neat things going on with collaboration and more.

Other than quick accessibility, using GitHub or other DVCS would address all the other points and probably offers a better solution in terms of multiple developers working off of their own independent copies without one developer's changes impacting everyone else. Unless, of course, CoderBuddy already offers multiple independent working sets with branching and merging of code as part of its feature set.

(fyi, we're fixing a little bug with publishing that some of you might experience.)

I look at: https://coderbuddy1.appspot.com/legal/tos

and it immediately makes me concerned that anything written in the service that was later deemed exceptionally valuable would get lawyer locked.

I don't have the same concerns with gcc, eclipse, visual studio.

I don't see anything that's there to assuage my fears? I'm not saying that's what's going on in the least, but it's a reasonable fear, no? Or am I off base?

Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give CoderBuddy a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling CoderBuddy to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.

Some lawyer really went over that, you make me feel like I need one too.

> for the sole purpose of enabling CoderBuddy to provide you with the Service

IANAL, but that's a pretty strong qualifier: "the sole purpose" basically says they can only use your app for, well, the sole purpose of providing you with the service.

Thanks for sharing your concerns, and I understand where you're coming from. I encourage you to check out the TOS's for Google App Engine and Heroku and other cloud-hosting services, which have similar wording, as I understand it. If you have suggestions on better wording that meets the needs of what we need to be able to do to provide the service etc., we welcome suggestions on that. Thanks.

I understand what you mean, most legalese can seem quite imposing out of context. The nut of the problem for me is that it's obvious you're intending a profit making venture (tos, etc.) but you aren't telegraphing where the money comes from. With heroku, etc. it's clear what their intent would be (paid hosting) even when embryonic or unstated. As many IDE's are free without service terms if your intent is to sell SaaS, perhaps a "beta testers get free (blip) when we launch" - or whatever. That at least would keep me from worrying on the monster behind the curtain.

thanks, we put a bit on that here:

https://coderbuddy1.appspot.com/help

If CoderBuddy is free, how will you make money to pay the bills?

Our goal is to keep providing our current services for free, and expand those free services. We expect to earn revenues from advertising and from helping software developers earn money for their work. We may also charge fees to a tiny percentage of heavy users of disk/bandwidth/cpu to cover costs, but those should only apply after usage of a generous free quota.

I didn't realize how much having an editor in the web browser would make playing with this sort of development more seamless. I'd experimented with GAE before but I usually code in vim so switching from terminal to browser to terminal broke up the flow of trying stuff out. I'm not sure how viable this is for large application development, but I think if you put some tutorials in (perhaps like Ruby Koans), it would be an amazing learning tool.

Thanks, we'd like to build towards support for a good range of tutorials and other educational and performance-building/enhancing interactions. It may take a bit of time to build it out towards supporting large application development well, but we hope to get there over time!

I think CodeBuddy is a good, not great idea. But the implmentation is poor. Unless I need a quick guestbook application ;<).

It's not in Python, but if you want to see a well done off line version of the same thing checkout http://alan.blog-city.com/openbd_desktop.htm

It's an Eclipse based desktop app that makes publishing to the GAE pretty simple. IF CFML isn't your cup of tea there's no reason why you couldn't implement a fork for any other language.

This looks promising. I found a small issue off the bat - when I created a new guestbook app and then previewed it, I received the following error:

TemplateSyntaxError at /

Caught TemplateDoesNotExist while rendering: base.html

I went back and edited the 'base.html', hit save, and this fixed the problem. Thanks for the preview and good luck!

Thanks for passing this on, we'll look into it!

Is there a way to create new directories inside of a project? My apologies if I missed it, but I couldn't find one. A nice feature would be the ability to upload a zip file and have it unzipped on the server side with all the files added automatically to the project (rather than having to upload each file individually).

I think that a tool like this would be really great for students learning how to program. It allows them to experiment without the sometimes daunting task of having to set up a development environment.

I can definitely envision an application like this being used in the classroom.

Looks interesting, we've created a similar free Web IDE for server-side JavaScript - http://www.erbix.com/js/ . We'd love if you take it for a spin and give us any feedback you might have :)

An iPad-friendly layout would be interesting.

Thanks, we'll be working on that.

I saw several online-IDEs, but none offloads hosting to Google. What a great idea.

thanks!

Didn't Heroku have something similar to this a few years ago?

Yes, they did have something somewhat like it. (Heroku Garden I think it was called.)

Is it me or is founding investor of Napster an odd title?

"All your code are belong to us!". Somehow a web IDE doesn't seem to make much sense.

I suspect that using this product will be a punishment for not knowing Emacs or Vim.

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