What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?
These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.
Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.
Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.
As a Vim fanatic, I can’t say I’ll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.
I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.
It reminds me vaguely of Shells.
I think a lot of comments are looking at this thing the wrong way. This is not a feature that is designed to make things easier or nicer for developers. The target audience for this is managers.
Managers don’t want you to have a unique configuration for “your workflow”, they want a uniform workflow that they can just plug you into. They want to replace the unique person that is you with a corporate drone representation of you, as they have done with so many jobs already. When they can streamline your work down to " here is a ticket, push that button and you are ready to go", they reduce the rampup time of putting someone new into your seat to a fraction of what it was before.