Google Cloud Platform Blog: Develop in the cloud with eXo’s Cloud IDE

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Develop in the cloud with eXo’s Cloud IDE

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Today’s post comes from Mark Downey of eXo, creator of Cloud IDE. Cloud IDE is an online IDE for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby or Javascript, and for nearly two years it has been used by developers to build applications for a number of PaaS environments. They recently added support for deploying code to Google App Engine.

Since eXo started the Cloud IDE project back in 2010, our objective has been to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. We’ve made it easy to import, build and debug code from Github and to deploy it to a PaaS. We have tried to make the development workflow as painless as possible by providing a smooth integration with popular Cloud services from source control to application hosting, and now we’re bringing that integration to the Google App Engine world. Developers can now use Cloud IDE to build, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or any traditional desktop IDE. Everything happens right in the browser.It’s easy to get started. Once you have a Cloud IDE account, start a new project and select a Google App Engine app (Java or Python) as the project type. Confirm that you want to deploy to Google App Engine, and you will then be asked to create an app with your App Engine account.
This opens the App Engine admin console in a new browser tab, where you get to choose your app ID (which will define the URL of your application). Upon completion, a callback in the URL automatically updates your appengine-web.xml with your app ID, inside Cloud IDE. That’s it! From there, just click deploy and enter your credentials to build and deploy your app on Google App Engine.
In Java, you can use auto-completion (alt+space) and have access to all the Google App Engine libraries. Many keyboard shortcuts are also available to help you develop efficiently (Help > Show Keyboard Shortcuts). To run and debug your app on a development server, press Debug in the Run menu, and set your breakpoints. Your app will run in another browser tab and you’ll be able to inspect variables at runtime. To re-deploy, just go to the App Engine menu in Project > PaaS > Google App Engine, and click Update Application. The Google App Engine menu also enables you to view and update your App Engine services such as Indexes, PageSpeed, Queues, DoS, Resource Limits, Crons or Backends.

With eXo Cloud IDE, you can run, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or, for that matter, Eclipse itself). Because everything related to your development activities is taking place on the Cloud IDE servers, your initial setup time is dramatically reduced. In a couple minutes you can be focusing on the things that matter most: coding and refining the app itself. - Contributed by Mark Downey, product manager for eXo Cloud Services @marksdowney