I've been experimenting with switching to a web-based IDE for the last few weeks after doing a fresh install of my os. The idea of keeping my various dev environments and random crap I want to play with separated is extremely tempting.
It works really, really well but it's a terrible mistake doing it as a hosted service - being offline and latency ruin the experience completely, you can sync your repos locally but for offline work you need to mirror all your required software which gets you right back where you started.
I settled with Cloud9 which is an open source + self-hosted browser based IDE running on headless servers (one per project) in VirtualBox which is pretty nice. I think the future of cloud IDEs is going to hinge on having a local component for speed and availability with remote tools supplementing that.
It works really, really well but it's a terrible mistake doing it as a hosted service - being offline and latency ruin the experience completely, you can sync your repos locally but for offline work you need to mirror all your required software which gets you right back where you started.
I settled with Cloud9 which is an open source + self-hosted browser based IDE running on headless servers (one per project) in VirtualBox which is pretty nice. I think the future of cloud IDEs is going to hinge on having a local component for speed and availability with remote tools supplementing that.