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Could this be the eventual IDE in the cloud so many others have failed at? Start with getting everyone's code in the system, get them viewing code in your system, commenting on commits daily, then "hey while you're here, why not just edit the file in this little editor"...fast forward several more iterations/improvements and then you find yourself never leaving the web editor.

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Cloud9 IDE is actually a very nice cloud-based editor that already hooks into Github and others.

Can't upvote this enough. Quite a cool project, open source, runs on Node, and is very featureful.

I've been using it to write production code for almost 6 months now. Over the last month, they've eliminated all the minor annoyances. It's solid and works. I couldn't complain even if I wanted to. The codebase is also very approachable. I needed a feature, wrote it, pull request, and they accepted it.

Cool! What are the main benefits you noticed when comparing it to the traditional offline model?

With a traditional IDE, you have to install it everywhere. With me, that would be a half-dozen computers, with 500MB lost on each one. With Cloud9, it's installed on the server and I can access it anywhere there's a net connection. Updates are centralized, you only need to do it once.

And it's funny, but the IDE is actually more performant in the browser. Well, I was using Aptana before, which is essentially Eclipse and that's known to be slow.

Also, it just feels natural to have your IDE right next to the end product. IDE in one tab, web app in the other.

In fact, Ace (the Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor) is what Github uses for their file editing interface, so if you're editing files on the site directly, you're already using Cloud9, partially.

I had to use Cloud9 a few months ago to populate a new repo for a small project I wanted to share. With today's changes I wouldn't have needed to use Cloud9. Being able to add files is long overdue and I wonder how much it was to stem the tide of users using third party sites to populate github and thereby becoming entrenched in a development/publishing workflow that only used github as a storage layer and not somewhere where you would spend time or send others to the github website.

I most definitely agree. However I don't know how they would go about integrating the IDE while maintaining the healthy git workflow that many have come to love.

mbed.org has been doing this successfully for a few years now. The difference is that it's a compact, tightly integrated IDE for a specific technology (C/C++ embedded development) rather than trying to solve everybody's problem.

And yes, we have integrated version control. Based on mercurial. :)

What if the internet goes out?

You could still use a local copy. DVCS rox.

What if the power goes out? What if your main development PC goes down?

The question is really how often does this happen and how long is it out for. Personally I don't remember the last time my internet was out for more then an hour, and that wasn't even in the last year.

Google Docs must have the same problem, how do they mitigate it?

Google docs has local storage capabilities, at least with their android versions though I think the web version supports it too.

The "local storage" support in Google Docs Android client is still abysmal. I've more than once gotten network related errors when trying to do stuff to a document that I've explicitly marked as "offline".

Vastly better than before though - their offline support is very new.

Google Drive.

I can see the always-on scenario playing out ok for some (web-developers, enterprise folks etc), but I don't see how the hardcore C crowd and their hyper-customized build farms would gain anything from it.

Editing on a laptop in an area with no WiFi or an internet connection would prove difficult as well.

Re: Google Docs - you can enable offline editing with Google Docs.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...

Oh well, then my ISP must suck :( Anyways, I travel a lot with my laptop: and I don't have WiFi connection everywhere I go: that's why I don't "live in the cloud" for now.

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