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Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

typefox.io

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#51
post #7
post #2

How does it compare to existing versions of this like Eclipse Che or Cloud9 (c9.io)? I don't see the motivation they had to build this other than they wanted support for YANG right? I'd want to see their motivation behind taking on such a big project

Also the motivation is to make an opensource IDE that's not managed by one company in particular like vscode&microsoft or atom&github... The end goal is to have something that has its governance managed by a fondation and that multiple entities can contribute to. So don't think of it as typefox taking this on their own they're not alone and more contributors will get involved.

[deleted]

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#52

This looks very nice! Just wanted to join out that JupyterLab (in alpha now) https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab also uses PhosphorJS and aims to be a IDE in the browser as well.

Jupyterlab is really nice, too! A significant difference is that it is deeply integrated with jupyter notebooks. So it really targets data scientists working with jupyter. Theia is more general, by being a platform for all kinds of IDEs and tools. They could have built Jupyterlab on top of Theia but not the other way around.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#53
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're wrong, you can't run VS Code on the cloud.

It's not full VS Code, but the shell certainly runs in the browser, along with the editor, and auto-complete, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14259463 I have a comment elsewhere in this thread imagining a headless VS Code with a remote UI in the browser. Would get you something close to Theia with the full VS Code ecosystem.

Vscode's architecture is not fit for that, as it runs additional node processes (e.g. the extension host process) that are chatting with the renderer process on a very fine-grained level.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#54

This clearly uses many parts of VS Code source code. So the question is - why bother creating another inferior to VS Code editor? AFAIK you can run VS Code on cloud without problems since it's Electron to the core.

Another difference is that vscode's extensions are very limited, as they run in their own process and can only access what has been explicitly made available. Today that excludes any means to build more advanced views. You could for instance, not build something like the git panel as an extension.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#55
post #23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing that prevents you from doing the first one, if for some reason you prefer working in the browser rather than in some Electron application. For fully local scenarios, it is expected that it will be able to work like a standard editor: you just launch it and work, you don't have to be aware of this frontend/backend separation. The use case I am interested in is the following: at my company, code has to…

It's off-topic, but I just have to ask. Why? Why would local copies be disallowed?

I guess it's a (perhaps debatable) security argument. If I leave my unlocked laptop unattended (but not connected to the VPN) in a public space, for example, then it makes it harder for a third party to steal that code. I'm sure you'll find one thousand counterexamples where it wouldn't help, but no policy is perfect.

But a more practical reason is that some legacy software is designed to be run on these company servers, it expects certain things to be at particular places, so you need to work on them. Again, this is not ideal (and we try to change that little by little when possible), but that's how it is right now.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#56
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prevent someone to copy it all on a laptop and sell it for example.

That's completely ridiculous (and, unfortunately, also completely plausible with companies) - see the so-called "analog hole" (or in this case even digital - if it hits the browser as textual content).

There is still a big difference in terms of attach surface between a complete repo cloned in /home/$USER and some transient partial information that is gone (in theory) once you close the application/browser, so I don't see why it's completely ridiculous.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#57
post #48
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prevent someone to copy it all on a laptop and sell it for example.

I doubt the code is that valuable, but if you don't trust your employees to not do that (seriously, nearly every other company trusts their engineers at least that much), then why did you hire them in the first place?

Do you mean "trust" as in trusting they don't have malicious intents, or trusting they won't be lazy or distracted sometimes? In this case I don't think it's the former, since nothing technically prevents an employee from cloning the repos and running away to a competitor. I think it's part of good security "hygiene" that helps protect you from yourself.
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