Project IDX: An experiment to improve full-stack, multiplatform app development
developers.googleblog.com
developers.googleblog.com
One could also make the opposite argument that having beta testers is a way to build hype. It all depends on the situation.
Google: We've made our tech stack so complex you need an AI to get started working with it.
Shut down due to low adoption < - > Low adoption due to fear of it being shutdown
Privacy, speed, lock-in, etc.
Especially with google's track record.
Other development environments might not benefit so much:
For Go, the SDK is easy to install and VS Code works.
I’m out of date on Python and assumed package management would be kind of a pain to deal with, but I tried miniconda recently and it it’s pretty nice.
Web development environments continue to evolve, but there are some easy to use ones. I like Deno so far.
I'm not confident that gcp will survive 5 years at this point, so this thing? this is one of those google products that is practically born killed.
The google name has become an anathema at this point, at the very least they can try and spin it off as an independent startup or something to try and give it a chance.
Other products to check out: codesphere, stackblitz, Replit
This is a guaranteed path to making it so that shipping code or building a business is dependent on one of a few mega corps (who will happily shut you down, rip off your ideas, etc, at a moments notice).
"Only the paranoid survive." - Andy Grove
The inclusion of Flutter support here makes me slightly more willing to invest in learning it.
How is a locked down vm, that I don’t control, “near me” more convenient than the fast, portable computer in front of me that I can build apps anywhere on, even when not networked?
I personally love being able to compile massive projects while sitting in front of a MacBook Air or iPad. It sips battery while churning away at a data center elsewhere.
Not really, honestly, and I've tried it in the past. Maybe it's a lifestyle thing, I travel around a fair bit on the train and value being able to do everything from my laptop. With an M2 MacBook Pro I can also churn through big Swift/Rust/JS projects and with a local LLM installed and some offline docs it's pretty productive.
Wasn't his point that he already has a quite-fast-enough computer much nearer; like, right in front of his nose? As do I; and, I wager, you.
You almost certainly don't need to pay a premium and give up control to get a couple of extra nines on your availability.
Given the blog title and the blog itself, I was expecting a bit more and something less piecemeal rather than what is actually presented here which is an online IDE mixed with google AI.
This seems tailored to being good at doing front end stuff (multiple emulators, multi-browser previews, etc). Which is probably a problem google deals with themselves.
1. A bunch of really smart folks asked me for help with it on a few different projects. I tried GCP's VSCode extension but it wasn't particularly easy to use.
Eh... GTK? (Or Qt?)
Yea, and those products are not doing well. It would be nice to see Google focusing on the ship that's already sinking rather than trying to play with a siny new toy.
EDIT: to add, the blog post does mention this: it is built on-top of VSCode, so it's a UI people are used to.
(googler, opinions are my own).
So yeah, regard it as an interesting plaything; certainly not something that you should get too emotionally or intellectually invested in. Especially given Google's penchant for killing cool things.
You should not do anything serious on Google-based technology, especially not on non-core technology, as it cannot be depended on to be properly supported or even exist at all.
Similarly, it's safe to assume that any and all data that can be collected will be sent to the mother-ship for whichever purpose they see fit. I increasingly believe that the very similar act of hosting your proprietary code on Github is plain dumb. We're lazy and naive, actively creating these monopolies by giving away our value, data and secrets for free.
Convenience and (initially) free is how we keep falling for this.
Google is both harmful and childish. They don't do responsibility. They toy around like little children and cannot even grasp the concept of a customer. They can suck and screw up anything they touch for decades in a row with seemingly zero consequences. Because somehow 30 billion gets printed every quarter regardless of what they do. That would be 30 billion earned over the backs of the content WE produce, not Google.
In fairness, their office is an excellent adult daycare center.
I wouldn't call IDX core because it doesn't solve the problem the article opens with. It says that modern app stacks are complex. IDX doesn't solve that at all. There's the same amount of moving parts behind the curtain, it's just that stitching them together is made easier.
The motivation for the service is unclear, but in itself it can't produce serious revenue so I guess it's an on-ramp to Google Cloud hosting. And perhaps another "free" service to train AI on.
We can certainly agree that to "navigate an endless sea of complexity" in getting an app "from zero to production" is no fun. Firebase is in the business of making this easier, and IDX is probably, as you might imply, an on-ramp to use Firebase. I don't see what is wrong with that.
I also fail to see why IDX would be free. I guess it will run in the Google Cloud, and provide their developers with some hard earned income.
All in all I'm still positive in hoping that there will be a real solution for a real problem :)
My neutral stance is that this is a potentially marginally useful tool. There's nothing fundamentally new about it. Github has an online IDE, as does Amazon, as does everybody. In particular at Github it shouldn't be that difficult to connect it to deployment actions, after which you have the same thing, yet with more flexibility.
As said earlier, it doesn't reduce the complexity of the tech stack nor will it maintain itself. When you create a React/Vue app this way, your shit continues to constantly get out of date. And you'll need to continue to coordinate dev setups within a team.
Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
Joining a team with such a project is not an easy task. In a typical 500,000 line code project, it may take a whole day or more to get the basic system up and running. All the dependencies may break in a myriad of ways, and can result in a lot of unnecessary problem hunting.
Sure, there are tools to automate setting up the build environment. But even those require maintenance, and setting things up for quick onboarding requires a lot of time, and if done wrong, will take even more time to get right later.
It would save a lot of money and effort if I could have a reproducible development environment, and I would not mind if that is in the cloud or not.
You say that as if it were a God-given truth that that is how things must be, or maybe even as if it were a good thing that that is how things are. Which could hardly be further from the truth. The solution isn't to cover all that shit up with yet another layer of cruft, but to get rid of most of this fricking cruft.
Oh, it's idx.dev.