John Hartnup
ukslim
2 points

Following

  • Has a bright future

    March 11, 2016 11:05

    I'm a professional Java developer.

    When I got a Chromebook for home use, I wondered how I could code using it -- of course it's possible; my IDE used to be vi in a telnet session. But could I develop as productively as I currently do in a desktop IDE. So I tried Eclipse Che, initially via CodeEnvy.

    For anyone familiar with IDEs in general, there are no great surprises. I imported one of my toy Java projects from GitHub. There was a small speedbump in that my project used Gradle -- CodeEnvy does not support this, so I had to write a Maven POM. But once I'd done this, I had something that looked and behaved remarkably like a real IDE (which is what it is).

    There is a debugger, and I've seen it work. However on a couple of simple Java projects, I've found Debug missing from the Run menu. I'm used to being able to right-click then Debug a unit test, and I don't see that either.

    The big missing link for me, however, is refactoring. A huge part of the TDD coding habits I've developed over the years involve growing code using refactoring shortcuts. For example, write a statement inline, then alt-shift-l to turn it into a local variable. Write a big ugly method then refine it into smaller methods with alt-shift-m. These are all missing from CodeEnvy as I write.

    However, I also tried the nightly build of Che, and this has a couple of refactoring menu items ('rename' and 'move'). It seems very likely to me that we'll see more options added very soon.

    I don't think I would choose today's Che as my day-to-day IDE, but I would not be at all surprised if a few months from now it's where I need it to be.

    Stepping away from CodeEnvy to Che in general, the general idea of your IDE being a collection of Docker containers is fascinating, and shows a great deal of promise.

    Ease of Use Documentation Reliability Support