The Evolving Cloud Development Market
This is an exciting time in the web IDE market. Selfishly because Eclipse Che continues to grow in its community and enterprise adoption, but more broadly because everyone (even the most “traditional” organizations) are seeing the value of moving their development toolchains off localhost and into the cloud (both SaaS and private on-premises). The recent (re)launch of Cloud 9 by Amazon is yet another proof point.
But it’s good to remember that any large-scale market shift (like moving developers from laptops to the cloud) is a marathon, not a sprint.
The seeds of Eclipse Che actually began in 2014 and even up to it’s launch cloud IDEs were seen as toys for web developers. They were always attached to a single VM (most still are), had little to no true IDE features (debugging, content assist, refactoring, etc…) and couldn’t support Java and other enterprise-preferred languages.
So Che’s launch in early 2016 caused quite a stir. Partly because it may have been the first and last time anyone saw senior members of Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Red Hat on the same stage (LOL) but also because Che was the first to run containerized developer workspaces and feature a real IDE in the browser complete with debugging, refactoring and content assist.
Interestingly Che is still the only cloud IDE with:
- Java content assist, debugging and refactoring as well as the now obligatory support for interpreted languages. Our existing C++ debugging and compiling and will be complimented with content assist via clangd thanks to Silexica.
- Multi-container developer workspaces. Today these are based on Docker Compose or Dockerfiles, but shortly we’ll be able to support container composition with Kubernetes definition files as well.
- Support for the open Language Server Protocol (which we helped develop with Red Hat and Microsoft) in 2016.
- Deployable to the cloud or on-premises. Today Che only runs on Docker, but in Che 6 we will introduce support for running Che in OpenShift and OpenShift Origin.
It’s been incredible to see the adoption of the LSP with nearly 50 implementations already available and more being added by the week. This is completely changing the game for developers as it makes so many languages more approachable and turns any IDE that supports LSP into a polyglot dream. It’s also a game changer for language developers who can now expose their language to millions of developers simply by creating a single LSP implementation instead of having to write and maintain a ton of separate IDE plugins. It’s only mystifying to me why every IDE vendor isn’t already using it!
However, that’s just one aspect of the Che vision that we’ve seen gain traction in the market. Amazon’s (re)launch of Cloud9 this week is further proof that cloud IDEs are not just here to stay but are gaining both mindshare and marketshare.
Similarly Microsoft in their most recent Visual Studio Team Services demonstrations has started talking about developer workspaces and experimenting with VSCode attaching to cloud based VMs and containers, something that Che pioneered nearly two years ago.
So if you haven’t had a chance to try a modern cloud IDE you might be surprised — try a multi-container Java app in Che hosted at codenvy.io for free. The “Assistant” menu is where you’ll find many of the Java features and you can use CTRL+Space or CMD+Space to pull up content assist.
Going forward it only gets better. We’ll be releasing Che 6 shortly which will allow you to run a multi-user Che cluster inside OpenShift (or OpenShift Origin) behind your firewall for the ultimate in safe, cloud development for your whole team. This is just step one in what will be a series of features focused on expanding Che’s support of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Looking further and into next year we’ll be adding extension points to make customizing Che even easier as well as more collaboration options.
As always please let us know your thoughts by connecting with us on twitter @eclipse_che or by filing issues in the Che GitHub repo at https://github.com/eclipse/che
