CodEnvy team, thank you for participating in the JavaRanch giveaway.
I think some of the benefits of a cloud-based
IDE are obvious - I can run it from relatively modest hardware, I can run it from every operating system and don't need a local interpreter or compiler for the tools I'm using, I can switch between machines and devices quickly.
The pricing for an annual subscription seems reasonable - if you pay your developer a modest $40 per hour, even a professional license only has to save them 10 hours of lost time over the course of a year maintaining a traditional workstation for CodEnvy to pay for itself. With all of the easy integration with PaaS and other software tools and projects, I think it's likely the benefit is much higher.
But in turn, I have some questions about potential drawbacks.
- What if you raise the prices? Renewal time comes up, and suddenly it's $4000? Is there anything you can say to reassure a potential customer? Do you make it easy for customers to take all of their code and resources out?
- I understand that by using open source, you would open yourself up to competition by companies that fork your own code and host it on their own. But if a serious bug is introduced that blocks my work, you can have your 99.9% uptime and still prevent me from being productive. I would like the option to fix problems like that myself, or take advantage of fixes from others in the CodEnvy community. What can be done about that?
- What's the learning curve for someone accustomed to Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc...? (I don't see this as a serious drawback, most competent developers can adapt quickly to a different environment. I'm just curious.)
- The compilation process for my work is pretty resource-intensive and slow, even with the relatively recent solid state disk storage, Intel processor, and 16GB of RAM on my workstation. In practice, do your 1 GHz and 2 GHz single-core queues and their RAM allocations work for medium size applications, or are they too slow? How fast is the storage they use?
- Along the lines of the previous question, can you give information on some of the largest size software projects that are routinely developed using CodEnvy? Is it going to choke if I import something with a million lines of code?
Again, thank you for participating in the giveaway. I plan to take the open source edition for a spin.
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