I had a dream last night. It looked something like this:
The Rails Zero Web Development Environment
Why Rails Zero?
No installation
No configuration
No gem/dependency/firewall/proxy issues
No database install/configuration
Geographic and platform independent...just needs a browser and an
internet connection.
What Rails Zero provides?
.An always available, world accessible Rails development environment
for you and your development team.
.An ajax-enabled, web 2.0 Rails IDE (written in Ruby on Rails of course!!)
.Code editor includes syntax highlighting, code completion, refactoring, etc/
.Online source code revision control (a la subversion)
.full online hosted database schema control (mysql or postgresql)
.rails virtual consoles for interactive ruby/rails sessions including
debugging and migrations.
.Immediate gratification....log in, make a change, see the results in real-time.
.full control of your ruby/rails versions, plugins and engines.
Interesting, except I think perhaps without really compelling reasons,
most developers won't give up:
1) Textmate, vi, emacs, etc. The power and flexibility of a
developer's toolset would have to be surpassed in order to compel
people to switch.
2) Performance. Even though it might perform well on the server-side,
transmission over an Internet connection will slow it down (especially
things like running tests, debugging etc.).
Other than that it sounds pretty cool. I don't think it would be
something I would use (I prefer to automate more stuff using scripts
and the console like deployment, testing etc...unless you figured out
a way to do that), but cool concept nonetheless.