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Bringing on a new developer to a programming project with many dependencies can sometimes be a nightmare. I’ve seen an extreme case where the company finally gave up and bought the developer a new computer after a month of issues trying to configure his old one. More commonly, setting up a new development environment for a new developer might take between three days and two weeks.
That issue is one of the motivations for web-based developer workspaces. Another motivation is that machines for local development need significant CPU and RAM resources, which increase the cost of hardware; those resources allow the developer to build the project expeditiously. Computers for accessing web-based workspaces can get away with lower-end hardware than computers for local development.
As an added benefit, web-based developer workspaces can centralize and standardize a configuration. How many times have you heard “It works on my machine” in response to a bug report? Standardized environments can eliminate that problem.
In this article I’ll discuss three cloud IDEs that provide web-based developer workspaces. Two of them—Eclipse Theia and Eclipse Che—are fairly recent free-open-source projects currently under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation. The third —AWS Cloud9—is an older product that is now owned by and integrated with Amazon Web Services.
Eclipse Theia
Eclipse Theia is an open-source project to provide the Visual Studio Code development experience in a browser; it can also run on the desktop in the Electron shell. Theia relies on Visual Studio Code’s Language Server Protocol to provide language-specific code completion and the other features we expect in a modern code editor.
Because it can take advantage of the language servers written for Visual Studio Code, Theia has access to more than 60 available language servers including JavaScript, Java, Python,...