Since it took a bit of digging, I figured that I'd put this here: "Eclipse Dirigible is an open source project that provides Integrated Development Environment as a Service (IDEaaS) as well as runtime containers integration for the running applications" [1]

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[1] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/ecd.dirigible

Would be very curious to know if anybody has ever enountered this in the wild?

It's on the one hand alluring and on the other horrifying to me. I'm very curious what the real-world experience is of trying to develop and deploy an application this way. There appears to be an enormous amount of work in it ... so I'm assuming some non-trivial amount of people are using it in anger out there?

I could say that with Dirigible you can experience one of the fastest development turnaround times due to the In-System Development paradigm.

For example, exposing REST service is extremely easy: https://www.dirigible.io/api/http_rs.html. Just (1) create new project and new *.js file, (2) paste the example code and (3) save the file, the service is already exposed and you can see the result of the execution in the Preview view (or just copy the URL in a new tab).

Another big topic is the Low-Code/No-Code development - after some modeling, Dirigible generates for you a full-stack application with Database Tables, CRUD REST services and UI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_BMYNnLZQ

The project started almost 10 years ago and since 5 it is member of the Eclipse foundation.

In the end I could say that Dirigible is perfect for the job it was created, but you have to try it out for yourself to build confidence in it. Getting first hand experience is straightforward - (1) just go to https://www.dirigible.io/, (2) click on the "Try it Out" button and (3) try some of the samples available here: https://www.dirigible.io/samples/

It seems on the surface like Rails in a sense, just with an IDE out of the box and... in js.

It's actually pretty nifty make me at least want to build a ToDo (or something) app with it.

It is a good approximation of what we want to achieve indeed - high productivity in building applications of a selected list of archetypes.

Has Eclipse improved in recent versions? I do .net so I use Visual Studio 2019 mostly, and just used Eclipse back in the day for Java development, and then for Android. When Google did a fork of JetBrains as Android Studio I felt it was a pleasant improvement and an indication that the Android community wasn’t happy with Eclipse either, but I may have read too much into this change.

It's improved a lot (I use it every day, alongside IntelliJ and they both have pros and cons, but I probably prefer Eclipse) - but this isn't really related to the classic Eclipse IDE as far as I can tell. It's something completely separate.

I see, that’s interesting. Thanks for the update on Eclipse. Release notes for dirigible said they switched to xterm.js, I’ve been using that lib a lot in both an electron and a web app and it’s been impressive.

Replacing Eclipse with InteliJ was and still is a bin pain in the ....

Go over to any Android developer channel and see the discussion threads every time a new "stable" release comes out. Always with regressions, you need a gaming rig for any kind of usable development workflow, and C and C++ tooling get always the last bullet on support features.

Speaking of C and C++, it took almost two years, until InteliJ decided to create CLion, for Android Studio to provide any kind of support going forward to those NDK users left abandoned on Eclipse CDT with outdated Android plugins. Had InteliJ not released CLion, to this day Google would most likely not provided anything to NDK users.

So no, not everyone of us is happy with Android Studio.

If anything it made me appreciate Eclipse even more, given that it doesn't make my fans spin all the time, I can keep using my existing hardware for Java development, doesn't need ten finger shortcuts, has an incremental compiler, shows errors and Javadoc without having to do additional configurations.

Eclipse foundation has also developed a new modern alternative to VSCode compatible with VSCode extension called Theia [1]. Give it a try.

[1] https://www.theia-ide.org

The eclipse language server powers the vs-code Java plugin. I've found it to be quite good.

The first thing I noticed is how similar the interface is to VS Code. Is this some Frankensteined version of Code? If so, then a lot of the extensions from the marketplace should be compatible.

Dirigible's WebIDE indeed provides a simplistic look&feel of a modern WebIDE, which in fact is a bit similar to VSCode, but it is quite different from goals, personas, target scenarios, behaviour, etc. perspectives. In short, if you are looking for a general purpose IDE/WebIDE to write your "standard" Java, Node, Go, Ruby, Rust, PHP, etc. you should better choose Eclipse, VSCode, IntelliJ, Theia, or any other of this kind. In case you are in the "business applications" development side, where the time to deliver a product with a higher complexity, with many integrations, on different infrastructures maybe Dirigible can be your choice. The most recent newsletter can shed more light here: https://www.eclipse.org/community/eclipse_newsletter/2020/ma... As it is a "niche player", any feedback and feature requests are very much appreciated by the team.

Probably their new editor, Eclipse Theia which is basically VS Code with some Eclipse extensions. They claim it's more modular which allows it to run on desktop and cloud and under neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607

We changed the url from https://www.dirigible.io/release/2020/04/04/news_new_release... to the main project page, since this project seems never to have been discussed on HN before. At least I couldn't find it.

This is a horrible name for a SW product.

We've asked you before to stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN. Could you please really stop? This is a site for curious, thoughtful conversation, which comments like this are poisonous to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html