This is cool. I'd love to have some sort of GitHub (or just Git) integration. That would be powerful.
It would be awesome to just open a project on github & run it without downloading / installing. Great tool to tinker & learn. Add some profiling tools to the mix while you are at it. Imagine you are trying to decide between 2 different libraries or frameworks. You could just fire them up in Github & try out for a bit before making up your mind. Would be nice to generate compile & generate binaries on the fly too inst…
For your use case, we have been rewriting Codenvy for the past three years, both the IDE and the underlying infrastructure. The new system now also uses Docker as a tool for recipe construction of builder images and runner images. We then layer on an endpoint structure that we call Factories, which allows for automatic environment provisioning inclusive of code (from git or svn), the builder type (mvn, gcc, etc) and the runner environment which can be a pre-packaged solution (managed by Codenvy) or a custom environment as defined by a specialized docker recipe in your project space. The factories are just URL formats to make embedding or sharing entire environments (for cloning) easier.
If you'd like early access to the next gen system, people can write me tyler at codenvy, and we'll get you hooked up. We've been in alpha since early Jan and will go public beta in another month or so. We are just cleaning up some remaining items.