Gatt
5 points

Following

  • Java

    March 10, 2016 22:59

    I was trying Codenvy to test a Discord Bot that I've been writing in Java (yes, I know I shouldn't be using Java for a Discord Bot, but blegh! I'm a rebel!), and could not be bothered running it from home on my own computer all the time. After finally getting it to pull my Git repository and updating the maven config (That was a challenge for me as I rarely use Maven for locally hosted libraries), I had to then fix up a bunch of my code since for some reason Codenvy's Java Support doesn't run it with the -source 7 argument, and even when I manually added it it wasn't running properly; so I had to remove all my multi-catch expressions, and my list diamonds and fix it so that it'd support -source 1.5 (or whatever it is.).

    A couple of problems I found while using the free trial of Codenvy were the following; * Could not find a way to change the -source tag as I said before. * Could not run my Java application with less than 1GB of ram, even though I knew I could run it with less - It was saying that the application could not be ran with less than 1GB of ram. This in particular annoyed me, as I was hoping that I could run it with only 200MB of ram as I was on my computer, and make the most out of the free 20GB of monthly ram - but nope. * Sometimes the application would straight up fail to start, and when I started it again it worked fine. * It does not have any auto-completing features like Desktop IDEs to auto-fill functions etc. * Even though my classes were in a folder called "src" it could not find my Main class, or literally any of my other classes. Even though it built correctly, within the IDE itself it was saying there were errors whenever I referenced one of my classes... * It couldn't use the Scanner class to receive input from the Terminal - I later found out they removed support for this; but didn't continue on reading since I was in a bit of a rush.

    Some pros I found: * When it worked; it worked really well. Like. Reallllly well. The terminal output though was a bit laggy, and might take up to 10 to 20 seconds to update the log; which made debugging a bit of a chore. * The free 20GB of Ram per month seems like it's a cool thing; except it really does limit people who just want to try running their program for an entire day to make sure it works properly. I was trying to gather information about what commands people use the most with my Discord Bot; but since it shuts down after 4 hours; I had to login with my phone when I was out to restart it. But within a day I obviously lost all 20 GB of free ram to use.

    Overall; Codenvy is a very nice tool to test online programs. It works well for Java, except for those caveats that I mentioned before.

    I'm unable to comment on the Support for Codenvy since I didn't use any, hence why it's at "Ok". Reliability could've been a great if again, those cons weren't there. Ease of use I've given a "Great" even with those cons; because it overall worked, and when it did it was beautiful.

    Ease of Use Documentation Reliability Support