I am really starting to get into using Cloud9, a fantastic web based IDE. Don't worry, I am not on the payroll, but I really recommend you check it out. It is easily the closest thing to a fully working IDE in the cloud so far.
So anyway the first thing you probably want to know with a cloud IDE is "can I do my job?". In the case of client-side Javascript and Rails you most definitely can. It must be said that the terminal service that comes with Cloud9 is hit and miss, but it is stronger than you would imagine. More recently I have been doing a lot of playing with Meteor and I wanted to see how easy it would be to get Meteor running on Cloud9. Thankfully somebody else had the same idea and produced this, but being a devout Meteorite user I wanted to see if I could get further. After a quick glance at the changes to the Meteor codebase in the previous link it seemed clear that it was all down to port and IP binding (something else Cloud9 is particular about). So I took the diff file from the c9Installer, forked Meteor, made the same changes, changed my smart.json to point to my modified and BOOM... Meteorite on Cloud9. Smart.json looks as follows (you can use my repo or fork your own):
"meteor": {
"git": "https://github.com/royletron/meteor.git",
"branch": "master"
}
Important point! Once you have your project running in Cloud9 you need to use the following url pattern to access it
http://PROJECT NAME.USERNAME.c9.io/
Took me a little while to work out how Cloud9's stage domains worked :P
