User groups, projects and other things

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I'm part of a group of university students and graduates in the UK
called Student Robotics [1]. Our aim is to enthuse teams of 16-18
year-olds about engineering by getting them to take part in a robotics
competition which we run. A large part of this is that the teams
program the robots themselves, in python, for which we have them use a
web-based IDE to avoid needing to install stuff on school/college
computer equipment.

At the moment they do this using a custom-built IDE [2], but we've
recently been looking around to see what other web based IDEs there
are, both to see if we can share things a bit more with existing
communities, and to possibly reduce the load of having our own thing.
Having looked at Cloud9 [3] and noted a bad fit due to it being
cloud-hosted, someone suggested Collide as possible alternative.

Whilst, unfortunately, it doesn't look like collide is currently what
we're looking for, I thought it might be worthwhile letting you know
what things we thought were important, and finding out whether these
were planned (or even present and we've overlooked them!). The key
things for us are:
* Being able to use it in IE (including some older versions), I've
actually raised bug #36 [4] on this.
* Being able to have multiple projects
* Being able to group users into teams (that exclusively share projects)
* Being able to plug our own stuff into the IDE (we wrap up the
students code plus some other bits in a zip, among other things)
* The IDE being backed by VCS

On that last point, VCS support seemed to be partially present - the
file history and changes buttons looked like they should do something,
but didn't. Is this something that needs custom configuration in the
server? If so, we couldn't see (though admittedly not looking too
hard) how to do this.

The other thing we struggled with was a lack of usage docs, having
only found the code project wiki.

On a more positive note, we did like the smooth, clean & responsive UI
and the collaborative editing of files that collide offers.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org
[2] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Cyanide
[3] https://c9.io/
[4] http://code.google.com/p/collide/issues/detail?id=36

[Scott Blum]

Hi Peter,

That sounds really awesome. :)

The main thing to be aware of is that Collide is currently really just a tech demo, not so much a full product.  That being said, it would be great if it headed in a more usable-product direction.  If you guys are considering doing some work, I'm sure the folks here would be happy to opine and make suggestions.

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

* Being able to use it in IE (including some older versions), I've
actually raised bug #36 [4] on this.

This is actually the least likely.  Collide is designed around HTML5, and it's just not going to work on older browers, ever.  Too much of the smooth editing experience depends on it.

 

* Being able to have multiple projects
* Being able to group users into teams (that exclusively share projects)

These would both be great.  Right now the best you can do is run multiple servers on different ports, possibly with different passwords.  Doing real projects/users/groups would need new UI + persistant server state (the current model is basically stateless); or less aggressively, configuration files (it's currently zero-config, except for password).

 

* Being able to plug our own stuff into the IDE (we wrap up the
students code plus some other bits in a zip, among other things)

It's open source. :)

 

* The IDE being backed by VCS

On that last point, VCS support seemed to be partially present - the
file history and changes buttons looked like they should do something,
but didn't. Is this something that needs custom configuration in the
server? If so, we couldn't see (though admittedly not looking too
hard) how to do this.

There is still some UI code around VCS, but there is no VCS integration at present.  For one thing, we'd have to decide which VCS (or VCS's) to support.  Git would probably be the most natural choice.  In the meantime, the typical workflow is to use the IDE as an editor really, and do VCS yourself on the command line.

 

The other thing we struggled with was a lack of usage docs, having
only found the code project wiki.

Yep.

 

On a more positive note, we did like the smooth, clean & responsive UI
and the collaborative editing of files that collide offers.

Thanks, that's what we like, too. :)

Scott 

[Peter Law]

Scot wrote:
> That sounds really awesome. :)

Thanks!

> If you guys are
> considering doing some work, I'm sure the folks here would be happy to opine
> and make suggestions.

Cool. I'm not sure what we're going to do for the moment, but I'll
certainly encourage some others to jump in here.

I wrote:
>> * Being able to use it in IE (including some older versions),
>

> This is actually the least likely. Collide is designed around HTML5, and
> it's just not going to work on older browers, ever. Too much of the smooth
> editing experience depends on it.

Ok, I fully accept that this isn't something you'd want to spend time
on. However, this is unfortunately one of our most key requirements -
experience shows that the teams will likely be using highly locked
down (and often outdated) school/college computers - we've only just
dropped support for IE6!

>> I've actually raised bug #36 [4] on this.

I should clarify that this bug relates to IE9 (though possibly earlier
versions, but I didn't try others after IE9 failed).

Thanks,
Peter

[Scott Blum]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Peter Law <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, I fully accept that this isn't something you'd want to spend time

on. However, this is unfortunately one of our most key requirements -
experience shows that the teams will likely be using highly locked
down (and often outdated) school/college computers - we've only just
dropped support for IE6!

I assume Chrome isn't an option?  Often times Chrome can be easy to use, since it installs into the user's own settings folders rather than the system folders, so it can be installed without admin access.

[Peter Law]

Scot wrote:
> I assume Chrome isn't an option? Often times Chrome can be easy to use,
> since it installs into the user's own settings folders rather than the
> system folders, so it can be installed without admin access.

Unfortunately not! We've found that some school/college IT depts
restrict running of programs to those only in %ProgramFiles%, so you
can't even install Chrome, let alone run it. These also tend to be the
ones running the really old versions, but thankfully most aren't that
bad.

Peter