Is localhost development obsolete?

Topic explored: Someday soon developers will only need a basic Chrome Book and a wifi connection to do their work. No software will be installed locally other than a browser.

I’m not so sure this trend will pan out across the board, but there are several reasons it makes sense.

Software development traditionally requires a high end machine capable of running everything the server needs plus an array of development tools. That translates to a non-trivial setup process and leads to subtle variations in what packages are installed. Some languages try to make life easier, for example python with virtualenv, or Ruby with rmv, but it is rarely a 100% perfect match between all team members and the production servers.

Why is localhost bad?

Using the exact same system libraries in dev, qa, staging and production is a smart thing to do because it eliminates bugs related to differences between versions. As a contract developer with multiple clients, I often have several projects going at once on the same development laptop. Keeping all the dependencies wired correctly gets annoying sometimes, but I’ve kept good notes and for the most part it doesn’t get in the way.

Dependency hell is a real place and I’ve been down there too many times.

In the modern world we solve problems by outsouring them to the cloud. So why not outsource localhost to the cloud?

The winning combination as I see it is:

• Web Shell for Vagrant / Git
• GitHub (or BitBucket) for collaboration
• Web based IDE
• Slack – not required but might as well publicly get on the Slack bandwagon now, ’cause it does make my life better.

In a nutshell, this new solution allows developers to edit code in a browser tab, click a button to launch a vagrant instance on AWS,  access shell commands in another browser tab, and integrate perfectly with source control. No need for any development libraries or tools installed locally. This lends itself heavily to the LAMP / MEAN stacks, but I don’t see why Java, C++, or any platform wouldn’t work with this approach.

Vagrant makes localhost as a server obsolete:

Vagrant is a utility for spinning up virtual machines that run your application. Vagrant is heavily configurable. The config file lives in your project’s source code, typically in the root directory. With Vagrant all team members run the exact same virtual environment. Vagrant integrates with VirtualBox by default, but also Amazon Web Services, VMWare, and allows custom providers. Vagrant links your source code into the app directory it is hosting. When you make edits to your code the VM is automatically updated.

As of Vagrant 1.6 (April 2014), Vagrant started supporting Windows as the server environment. This was a smart business move for Vagrant (if I dare use the word business in the same sentence as an open source project). With 1.6, supporting Windows virtual machines is a major step for Vagrant to be universal and not just a *nix tool for all the l33t people working LAMP / MEAN variants on Macs and Linux.

Web Based IDEs to challenge local development:

A Web Based IDE will have to be downright amazing to get developers to switch in large numbers. It has to have a super fast search feature, auto complete, syntax highlighting, code formatting, and lots of flexibility. Remember, software development is like herding cats, so it has to work with everyone’s finicky little idiosyncrasies. Editing code aside, it will flop without a powerful plugin architecture. I would expect a rich ecosystem of utilities including a database explorer, command line tools, XML / JSON viewers, web services, test suite runners, file comparison, etc.

I have PyCharm, Eclipse, IntelliJ, PHPStorm, and Sublime Text currently installed on my Ubuntu development laptop. I have all that plus MSSQL Studio and Visual Studio on my Windows desktop (because some of my work does require Windows). That might be a low number of IDEs for a typical developer. For brevity, I didn’t mention text editors… That is a lot of functionality to cram into a browser, but people are out there working on it.

Here are some of the current contenders (in no particular order):

• Source Lair
• Nitrous  (out of business)
• Codiad
• Koding
• CodEnvy
• ShiftEdit

I’m not seeing an extensive plugin architecture from any of them… Maybe JetBrains can pull it off? They don’t seem to be working on anything publicly yet. From a business perspective they have no real incentive to cannibalize their current products. Besides JetBrains integrates with Vagrant via a plugin, and that solves most of the issues.

That feeling when you are stuck without a tool you need:

The command prompt is not a tool I like to use for data exploration:

Don’t get me wrong, I can navigate the SQL command prompt with the best of them. But let’s be honest, it SUCKS for wading through complex data. When there are enough columns to cause line wrapping per row it gets impossible to read. What about pasting huge queries? Every mature app has at least a few queries that span multiple screens, amirite? The SQL command line REALLY SUCKS for debugging lengthy queries written by ‘intelligent’ ORM frameworks or the bastard who writes SQL using string concatenation with inline if/thens, redundant joins, wanton disregard* to formatting, and over use of sub-queries {IN(), EXISTS(), etc}.

* Wanton Disregard – legal term meaning severe negligence, extreme recklessness, not malicious but more serious than carelessness, can be evidence of gross negligence, can result in punitive damages depending on severity.

There are many examples out there of web based data explorers but they are clunky at best (take PHPMyAdmin for example). A good web based SQL explorer supports multiple tabs, allows saving of SQL, and shows a basic picture of the database entities. MySQL Workbench, HeidiSQL and MSSQL Studio are the three tools I mainly use today. In the past I’ve used Toad, Navicat and DbVisualizer. They are great tools as well. In fact paid tools are generally better.

Side note – I was really hoping the Oculus Rift DK2 would be a good platform to build an app for data exploring, but it makes me sea-sick…

What’s the actual payoff?

If we are going to outsource something, we expect to save some money too. Economically, unless I’m missing something, the payoff this new approach provides for run of the mill software development isn’t really that big.

• If your company already has QA + staging environments, in theory you’ll catch bugs related to environment differences anyway.
• If you don’t have QA + staging, you’ve got bigger problems to worry about than minor package differences on some contractor’s laptop.
• Bugs come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Even if there is a bug due to environment differences, it is a small percentage of overall bugs that happen.
• Vagrant alone solves the issue of keeping everyone’s server environment the same, and it is free.
• The cost savings of an ‘automatic’ environment setup is a rounding error compared to a developer’s cost per year. Crappy developers take ages to get their environment going because they don’t understand $PATH or other basics. For me it is typically under an hour to get up and running. Good software shops have scripts that assist the developer in obtaining database dumps and the like.
• If developers all require cloud instances to be spun up during development that is an added cost on top of licenses / subscriptions for the IDE.
• If the infrastructure running the Web Based IDE goes down, all your programmers are idle.

Where a Web Based IDE does make sense:

For certain applications, like cluster computing, or big data (where localhost is just too small), I think it makes perfect sense. In situations where high security is needed, a locked down Web IDE also makes sense (no data or code on localhost at all). This might put an end to developing over a VPN through RDC – thank god for that!

Cloud based software development tools can work in theory for just about any style of programming, even 3D-game developers. Nvidia offers a cloud gaming grid which houses an array GPUs in the cloud, renders HD video in the cloud, and streams it back to the client. If you can develop Ruby in the cloud, why can’t you do OpenGL or DirectX? At least, that is what Nvidia is saying. Sounds like fun!

>>> “there's no place like localhost... “ * 3