I’ve been experimenting with cloud development environments.
Here are the ones I’ve been using and what I’ve learned about them.
TL;DR
Cloud development environments are so capable now that it hardly makes sense to install a development environment on my computer. At least for that kind of development.
CodeSandBox.io is going to be my primary environment for a while. It’s got what I need. I may also use Scrimba.
JSFiddle.net
This is the old school JavaScript sandbox. This is the one that things off it all and the first one that I used. Today it seems well behind the times. I have also used some others, like JS Bin, Fiddle Salad, and repl.it
Plunkr
I used it when I was messing around with Angular and facebook. I’ve still got a couple of Plunks in my library.
CodePen.io
I used it for a bunch of client-side experiments. The great thing about it was instant response and excellent editing experience.
Glitch.com
Glitch was the first environment that I used that handled both client side and server side. So It was a complete node development environment, and I did some exportation into Google’s APIs with it. Its user interface is a little funky and weird. I don’t think it compares well to the alternatives below.
Google Cloud Console
Google gives you your own Linux Docker container, freshly provisioned each time you use it. That’s a problem because it takes a lot longer to spin up than some of the other environments. You can also define your own customized VM, so you have a degree of flexibility that you don’t get elsewhere.
Also, there’s an elegant tool for building your own tutorials.
The editor is pretty crappy, and it keeps disconnecting, so not so much.
Gitpod.io
Lets you clone any Github repository, branch or commit into a VM that it provides for you. It even has a browser extension that puts a GitPod button on your Github pages. Click and get a gitpod. But it takes a while to spin up your VM. There’s got to be a better way because everyone the others do it better.
Unlike Google Cloud console’s VMs, these persist. But each Gitpod is independent of the rest.
CodeSandBox.io
CodeSandbox is really fast. You can embed CodeSandbox apps in your web pages (or blog posts) I’ll post at length, later.
StackBlitz.com
StackBlitz is the runner up. Maybe more to come later.
Bit.dev
An excellent environment for finding and tuning up pre-made React components.
