Cloud9 IDE Review

A couple of weeks ago, Ajax.org released a new IDE for Javascripters known as Cloud9. It’s an open source project built on Node.js. In case you don’t know, Node.js is an implementation of Server Side JavaScript (SSJS) and is now actively being used for SSJS development. Since Cloud9 IDE is built on top of Node.js, it has an integrated debugger for Node.JS applications. In this article we’ll be taking a look at various features of Cloud9 such as those mentioned above, but for now let’s begin with installation.

Installation

Installation is very simple provided you’re familiar with the terminal. There are three ways to install Cloud9:

1. If you’ve Git installed on your system then you can get the code repository directly from Github. Just enter the following command in your terminal:

git clone git://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9.git

After Git checkout, enter the following command to install all the submodules and run the IDE:

bin/cloud9.sh

The editor will open in your default browser after all the submodules have been installed.

You can also install Cloud9 via NPM

npm install cloud9

or by downloading the source code from Github.

Review

Cloud9′s UI is similar to Eclipse IDE, so Eclipse…

Git for Source Control

Source Control is an essential part of the development system that any and every programmer needs to utilize. Simply put it is a repository of source code that keeps track of revisions and is a system that allows multiple programmers to work on one copy of code without issues. There are numerous version control systems (VCS) out there including Subversion, Mercurial and Bazaar. Everyone has their preference, today we will be focusing on git, a VCS that has become more popular in the latest months.

Git

A typical programmer’s workflow would be to:

1. pull (download) the latest copy of code from the git respository.
2. Make neccessary changes, modify code etc.
3. commit the changed files
4. push (upload) the files back to the git repository.

If multiple programmers were working on the same project they would all use the same git repository. It’s good practice to always pull the latest copy before you push any of your changes to make sure your using the most update-to-date copy of the code (Someone may have pushed another change while you were editing your code). You can also branch (fork) a git repository. For example two programmers might be working on the same…