Online vs Offline IDEs

Offline IDEs

There are several offline IDE that programmers use in order to stay more productive to learn and be more productive at work.

• Eclipse is more than a Java editor. Its biggest advantages are code completion by tabbing method which saves a lot of time when writing documentation.

  It has a built-in syntax check to fix any mistype words while coding a project. All of features we've come to expect of an IDE are their code completion, templates, integration with various SCMSs, and integration with build systems.

  Its code formatting and cleanup tools are very powerful. I find its build system to work well and intuitively. I think these are the things upon which its reputation is really built.

  Furthermore it has a refactoring that find and replace function, variables and classes of a specific work.

• NetBeans is a free intuitive editor that does it all compared from other IDEs. It has simple Swing GUI design tool to build user interfaces by dragging and dropping components for instance buttons, textboxes.

  The disadvantage it is that with all its features it is slow to load and uses more memory than other IDE's.

• IntelliJ IDEA it is the most efficient offline editor however it is not free. It is faster than most editors however it has numbers of problems. Some major advantages is using too much memory from system.

• BlueJ is a simple editor mostly used to teach java and object oriented programming. The main advantage of the editor over other ones is that it does not need a main method to run the program.

Online IDEs

• CodeRun Studio is an online IDE that you build web application. It allows you to run and test code online.

  The disadvantage is that there is a 14 days trial then it must be paid. It is difficult to save your project since you must pay in order to fully operate it.

• Cloud9 IDE Cloud9 IDE is a open source, from version 3.0, online integrated development environment. It supports hundreds of programming languages, including PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript with Node.js, and Go. It enables developers to get started with coding immediately with pre-setup workspaces, collaborate with their peers with collaborative coding features, and web development features like live preview and browser compatibility testing.

  It is written almost entirely in JavaScript, and uses Node.js on the back-end. The editor component uses Ace. As of July 2014, it uses Docker containers for its workspaces, and is hosted on Google Compute Engine.

  Cloud9 IDE, Inc. is the company that actively maintains Cloud9 IDE. The company has offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam.

Conclusion

There are several differences between online editors and the offline editors.

An offline IDE will be more beneficial to a programmer rather than an online IDE due to the fact that large projects will slow down, and a software team will need a reasonable office internet service.

If there is a major storm the connection will be affected causing many projects to be unfinished and incomplete.

The only advantage of an online IDE is that projects can be access everywhere; there are no setup and configurations. There is no hardware limitation since all information is be stored in the cloud.