I recently came across a post about Eclipse Going Online while on my blackberry this morning. The author seems to think that:
we will see a viable online alternative to the desktop IDE soon.
This quote is interesting because I’ve been recently dealing with folks that insist everything can be done within a web browser using AJAX. Call me naive, but I don’t think we will ever see a flow-blown IDE on the web until certain criteria are met. Sure, we may see something to help draw diagrams and spit out EMF models… but something to help you setup a toolchain to work with your Nokia S60, no.
Some of the problem stems that a lot of people doing “Web 2.0” development are using JavaScript. One of the big problems with JavaScript is that you have access to nothing involving local resources (ie., native things). Ever try to do something simple like playing a sound in JavaScript? Of the 9 ways to play sound, it seems the recommend way is to use Flash, nice! I’ll leave the programming model discussion out of this post as that’s another issue to deal with.
In conclusion, until JavaScript provides something like “JSNI” and grants web applications the ability to work offline, we will most likely not see a full-blown IDE on the web. By the time we get there, we’ll realize the technology existed awhile ago and it was called ActiveX and was just as bad.