It is true that when web applications try hard to mimic the behavior and workflow of similar desktop apps, they are in most cases much inferior to their desktop cousins.
On the other hand, who says you need to model these cloud IDE's in the likenes of desktop apps. The most successful online apps I know of, have nearly always ditched entrenched UI concepts from desktop in favor of more stremalined approaches - take GMail for examle - getting rid of the 3-pane layout model of desktp apps (and grouping conversations) made it much more usable than most of the webmail apps out there that still try (and mostly fail) to mimic their desktop counterparts... (as a sidenote - this is also one of the reasons I am rather sceptical of the whole movement of single-sourcing web- and desktop UI's - it has it's limited uses but not when it ends up bringing the whole desaktop app over to web) ASs for your examples - editing source code online should never require any sort of explicit "save" operation for anything else than establishing a common checkpoint for possible restore operations (I would actually argue that same logic would greatly benefit desktop IDE's as well). Also - one good story for online IDE's might have is enabling collaborative editing (remote pair programming, anybody?). In the end - it's al about what you are actually trying to achieve. I can see where online IDE coulde possibly ve hugely helpful in the cases where a hosting provider offers it's facilities to help build the apps on their platform. It's all online, there's no compilation step - just edsit and get instant gratification/feedback, instant debugging support, seamless versioning and backup. Done smartly it could easily allow you to transition the dev version to staging to production with no more effort than it takes to click a link. And in case of problems - reverting back to pevious stable release, could be just as easy... Used right and every aspect carefully thought through, it could be huge. Little less care, and you've just created a horrible and clunky thing that is many times inferior and much more awkward to use than it's desktop counterparts. On Friday, April 8, 2011 6:36:43 AM UTC+3, Steven Herod wrote: > > 'Instant backups' is a pretty weak justification Mark :) > > I've lost more data in my browser based editor via a mistaken > keystroke than every via disk failure. (Pressed backspace with the > wrong thing in item, hit F5 instead of ctrl-S to save). (Why did I > hit F5 you ask... because its the 'save' hotkey in another > application). > > This is a solution in search of a problem. 'Look, I can build desktop > like apps in javascript/flex/silverlight.... let's go build desktop > like apps!' > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
