Web-Based Development

Following on from my recent post about doing something this year, I’m committing to doing 12 months of “101”s; posts and projects themed at begining something new (or reasonably new) to me

January is all about node, and I started with a basic intro, then cracked open a basic web server with content-type manipulation and basic routing, created a basic API, before getting stuck into some great deployment and hosting solutions and then an intro to using node packages including cloud deployment

In my previous posts I’ve been developing code locally, committing to a local git repo and pushing to a remote git repo. This is fine for the particular situation, but what about when I’m not at my own pc and feel the need to make some changes? Maybe I’m at my dad’s place using his netbook with no dev tools installed?

Cloud9IDE

Cloud9 is an incredible web-based development environment that is so feature-rich you’d usually expect to fork out wads of cash for the opportunity to use it: LIVE interactive collaborative development in the same shared IDE (see multiple people editing a file at once), code completion, syntax highlighting, an integrated console for those useful commands like ssh, git, npm.

It’s frikkin open source too, so you could install it on your own servers and have your own private IDE for your own code, based in a web browser. How amazing is that?

It’s built on Node.js in the back-end and javascript and HTML5 at the front. I’ve been playing around on there for the past year, and it’s been improving all the time – it’s just the best thing around. Go and start using it now. There are still some bugs, but if you find something you can always try to fix it and send a pull request!

So. That’s great for my web-based development, so how about if I need to collaborate on this project with people who I’m not sharing my C9 environment with?

GitHub

If you’re not already using github but are already using git (what the hell are you playing at?!), go and sign up for this exceptionally “powerful collaboration, review, and code management for open source and private development projects.”

You configure github as your git remote, push your code to it, and other users can pull, fork, edit, and send pull requests, so that you’re still effectively in charge of your own code repository whilst others can contribute to it or co-develop with you.

Great. So how do I deploy my code if I’m using this sort of remote, web-based development environment?

Azure/AppHarbor/Heroku

Deploying to an existing Azure/Appharbor/Azure site from Cloud9IDE is the same as from your local dev pc; set up a remote and push to it! C9 has a built in terminal should the bare command line at the bottom of the screen not do it for you.

As for creating a new hosting environment, C9 also includes the ability to create them from within itself for both Azure and Heroku! I’ve actually never managed to get this working, but am quite happy to create the empty project on Heroku/Azure/Appharbor and use git from within C9 to deploy.

Coming up

Next post will be the last for this first month of my Year of 101s: January Wrap-Up – Node.js 101; a summary of what I’ve learned in January whilst working with Node, as well as a roundup of the useful links I’ve used to get all of the information.

What’s in February’s 101?.. wait and see..!