What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?
These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.
Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.
Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.
As a Vim fanatic, I can’t say I’ll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.
I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.
It reminds me vaguely of Shells.
The main pitch is that you don’t have to spend time and effort with installing and configuring a project for development when onboarding new people to it, or when you want to contribute to someone else’s project etc.
You get a proven, up-to-date “works on my machine” kind of environment that others also use, and you don’t need to “pollute” your host system by installing additional tools necessary for each individual project. Compilation (and other build steps), running the project, running the tests, debugging, IDE configuration (e.g. language servers, linter plugins), etc. all happen inside the container.
I personally don’t find it all that useful for projects I’m working on long-term myself, but it’s nice if you need to check something in someone else’s project which you’re not that familiar with.