We don’t need an online IDE!

I’m on vacation this week, and it’s great. I usually try to take at least one week off in between missions because it’s the best time to do it. Nothing to worry anymore about the one before, no knowledge of the one ahead, my head is free to dream and wander around and I have plenty of time to move forward on personal projects.

Now beyond my work on betRway.com, I’ve been thinking a lot today about the idea of an online development environment. On my last project, I’ve seen a lot of the possibilities AND limitations of current RIA technology, and more specifically the most advanced one IMO, ie Flex. Combine that with some of the modularity offered by OSGi on the server-side, the productivity brought by things like Grails, and more importantly the promise of unification of all of those technologies under SpringSource’s sponsorship… and it’s starting to become more and more interesting.

So I googled “online IDE”, and I found this great article on DZone, which is a few months old but gives a lot of links to some of the services that are already offering both niche and generic online environments. I’ve browsed through all of these and I have a bad feeling of “déjà vu”. It’s like those mobile web sites that try to reproduce a trimmed down version of their web counterpart: it doesn’t really work, and worse, it doesn’t even use all the potential of mobile platforms. It’s like we’re trying to copy our desktop IDE onto the web.

But when you really think of it for a moment, the reason why we need version control systems for example, it’s because everyone is working on its own, and we need to synchronize at some point. But this constraint almost disappears if we’re all working online. And online development can have impacts of similar magnitude on things like continuous integration, deployment, monitoring. Some of these tasks don’t even make sense anymore. And how about several programmers working on the same artifact at the same time? And think about the computing power that could be available for code generation or compilation…

The way I see it, even the programming languages that we use today are not designed to work like that. Think of Java packages correlated with file system directories. Think of all these destructured text files that our IDE’s have to parse and index to make some sense out of them and allow us to navigate through them: what if text files are replaced by databases at some point?

I’m just thinking out loud here, but I’m wondering whether we shouldn’t forget about everything we know in terms of programming paradigms, and get back to the objective: producing working software collaboratively. What would be the best and simplest way to do that, knowing that we are starting to have all the tools we will need in order to move our workspace into the cloud?

As far as I’m concerned, I already know what I would like in such an environment:

• More graphical programming, especially for high-level design, because visualizing is still the most efficient way to create and design IMO.
• No more boilerplate tasks like “check out”, “check in”, “run tests” and things like that. Just “share my code in the public workspace” and “test on save”.
• The ultimate reproducible build environment: everyone is using the very same frameworks and libraries at any time. No more environment variables or shell idiosyncrasies.
• Smart client stuff, with offline mode, auto-synchronization and conflict resolution when back online.
• Methodology directly integrated into the environment, not some small window on the real thing. Issue tracking, user stories, all of that at your fingertips.
• Direct communication with your remote peers through advanced tools like whiteboard, webcam, code review.

In fact, we don’t need an online IDE, not in the sense we think of an IDE today on our desktops. We need more than that. We need a collaborative environment that uses the full potential of the cloud to help us produce better software more quickly.

What do you think? What kind of high-level functionality would you like to see in such an environment? How do you picture it?