It's amazing how you can object to something so passionately, but flip your attitude altogether when you finally give it a chance. Cloud computing from the outside seems frail and limited in its capacities.

Having grown up in the gray-era between desktop apps and the migration to the cloud, I can relate to many people's reservations. As cloud-computing grows more powerful, though, this conservative position is becoming outdated and invalid. In fact, having used Codenvy now, cloud-computing seems light and agile, compared to the more powerful and heavy-set desktop IDEs.

Much like Google Chrome rejuvenated Internet browsing, Codenvy is helping revolutionize development; however, Google Chrome has grown heavy and slow for many over the years. Although Chrome is still very popular and functional, the browser has lost much of the lite GUI and simplistic design that once shadowed over competitors. I just hope Codenvy can avoid such a path down the road.

So far, Codenvy has a relatively easy to understand design. Navigation bars could use some more thought as far as making the user interface more intuitive. Codenvy's biggest area for potential improvement, though, is debugging and error messages. In fact, this is my only major reason for continuing to use a desktop IDE for the time being. The error messages and debugging capabilities of Codenvy and every other cloud development tool I have tried are utterly lacking compared to popular desktop tools. This one weakness alone for I and many others is enough to negate the elegance of remote-hosting and cloud development.