Hi all, I’m just a newbie / hobbiest coder that has slowly been learning php on Cloud9. When Cloud9.io ceased and moved over to aws cloud9, I had to find another IDE.
I have zero technical background and have not been able to get any other IDE to work.
I tried Codeanywhere, and it was awesome. All I had to click was LAMP Stack, and my environment was ready to go. I really liked that phpMyAdmin was also all ready to go. I have been using it for over a month now and its been great (its a little buggy at times, but it works for my purposes).
Recently (1 week ago), Codeanywhere has become unstable and no longer loads my container. I have subscribed to their basic payment plan, but I have only received 1 reply so far from a customer service rep who said it should be working… but it is not.
I noticed the last update was May 2018.
It looks like to me Codeanywhere is no longer being supported or developed? Does anyone know anything more about this?
Also, does anyone know of a similar replacement IDE that is just as simple to set up?
I am not familiar with those IDEs but I get the impression that the website used by them were remote, as in not your local system. Something that is highly predominant is to have a server in your local system that you use.
Eclipse is an open-source IDE supported by many members, most of which are large corporations including IBM.
NetBeans is another free IDE and has been included by Sun with Java for Java development. It supports many other languages including PHP.
There are many plugins/extensions available for Eclipse and Netbeans.
I also have no experience with Codeanywhere. I have used VisualStudio, Eclipse, Netbeans, Aptana and currently IntelliJ IDEA.
Of those, I found all but IntelliJ IDEA to have steep learning curves and overwhelming numbers of features that helped push me to turn away from them. To be fair, the struggles I had could very well have been because I was too much a newbie at the time and maybe I gave up on them too soon.
Also, my history and use may be important. I used plain notepad as my text editor for many years and even now I feel comfortable using Notepad++ I use the IDE for project management and versioning (GitHub)
I run code in a localhost server / VM servers / CLIs not the IDE
I have looked at many other IDE’s, and none offer the robust ability of Codeanywhere, along with it’s easy set-up. I only clicked about 3-5 options, and I was up and running with with the IDE and the LAMP stack built. Using MySQL was also simple to set up. I have spend days to weeks with other IDE’s and haven’t been able to get half the functionality I got with Codeanywhere.
I was really hoping that someone had made a “new and improved” Codeanywhere. However it seems all that is out there is complex beasts that require a technical background to set up, as opposed to Codeanywhere’s 3-5 clicks.
I had never heard of “codeanywhere” so I took a look, and I guess their strongest selling point is the easy setup. For their actual functionality it was not that impressive, what they have marked as high points is stuff that has been in most IDE’s for a decade or more.
I am not sure what language you work with, but Jet Brains have several good IDE’s (as mentioned earlier), just go to their main website and scroll down a little, then select your language. It will then show what options they have available for you. https://www.jetbrains.com
For the setup that is a little harder, again all depending on language. But you can easily run containers, virtual machines or even local setup, you just need to get over the initial few hours setting it up, and from that point it will feel seamless.
The problem in my case, is the “hours” is actually “weeks”.
Jetbrains I refuse to support now. I do use one of their products for my html/css editor, however their phpStorm is poorly (if at all) supported. I had a paid account and found their tech support absolutely useless. They never specifically address any of my issues. I also don’t know why these complicated sites don’t have a “pay to set up” option. What I need should only take someone 5 minutes to set up or less. I even asked them specifically if I could pay to have one of their techs to set up my environment and they advised they don’t offer that service.
I agree that they have good products, and that’s great for the computer engineers out there that can set up what they need. As a hobbiest, I just don’t have the weeks of time available to go through manuals and numerous support tickets (especially when the tickets don’t address the issues and just link to more manuals).
Thanks anyways, I’ll keep looking for something with a simple set that addresses my very basic needs.
I would recommend installing LAMP on your computer because it is then possible to not only have a local copy of the online database content but also all the PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc, files necessary to render the online website.
Editing and saving local files using a simple text editor and the results can be viewed instantly.
I have tried many IDEs and been very disappointed and always revert back to a simple text editor. There are numerous excellent validation tools which can ensure the resultant web pages conform and render on all platforms.