CoderBuddy, Napster investor's free Web IDE for Python & sites on App Engine

Hi, we wanted to invite a few of you into our private beta. This is still an early version of our product, but hopefully there's enough functionality that some will find useful.<p>CoderBuddy is free for commercial, non-commercial and open source projects.<p>There were a few posts on HN about having a web-based way to use Google App Engine for static sites, and that's one thing you can do with CoderBuddy.<p>You can build and publish web-based applications in Python on Google App Engine. CoderBuddy comes with an instantly updating test environment and integrated publishing to App Engine. we're starting to roll out a more advanced editor, the 'New Editor (beta)' link with tabs.<p>We invite your suggestions of who we should test this out with, and your top 3 feature requests. We've tried to make it really easy for someone to get started coding and publishing. We'd also love to hear from folks giving workshops soon who might want to try this out there.<p>Thanks, -Adrian (Napster founding investor, founder of social networking pioneer Ryze)

I look at: <a href="https://coderbuddy1.appspot.com/legal/tos" rel="nofollow">https://coderbuddy1.appspot.com/legal/tos</a><p>and it immediately makes me concerned that anything written in the service that was later deemed exceptionally valuable would get lawyer locked.<p>I don't have the same concerns with gcc, eclipse, visual studio.<p>I don't see anything that's there to assuage my fears? I'm not saying that's what's going on in the least, but it's a reasonable fear, no? Or am I off base?<p><i>Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give CoderBuddy a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling CoderBuddy to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.</i><p>Some lawyer really went over that, you make me feel like I need one too.

I didn't realize how much having an editor in the web browser would make playing with this sort of development more seamless. I'd experimented with GAE before but I usually code in vim so switching from terminal to browser to terminal broke up the flow of trying stuff out. I'm not sure how viable this is for large application development, but I think if you put some tutorials in (perhaps like Ruby Koans), it would be an amazing learning tool.

I think CodeBuddy is a good, not great idea. But the implmentation is poor. Unless I need a quick guestbook application ;&#60;).<p>It's not in Python, but if you want to see a well done off line version of the same thing checkout <a href="http://alan.blog-city.com/openbd_desktop.htm" rel="nofollow">http://alan.blog-city.com/openbd_desktop.htm</a><p>It's an Eclipse based desktop app that makes publishing to the GAE pretty simple. IF CFML isn't your cup of tea there's no reason why you couldn't implement a fork for any other language.

This looks promising. I found a small issue off the bat - when I created a new guestbook app and then previewed it, I received the following error:<p>TemplateSyntaxError at /<p>Caught TemplateDoesNotExist while rendering: base.html<p>I went back and edited the 'base.html', hit save, and this fixed the problem. Thanks for the preview and good luck!

Is there a way to create new directories inside of a project? My apologies if I missed it, but I couldn't find one. A nice feature would be the ability to upload a zip file and have it unzipped on the server side with all the files added automatically to the project (rather than having to upload each file individually).

I think that a tool like this would be really great for students learning how to program. It allows them to experiment without the sometimes daunting task of having to set up a development environment.<p>I can definitely envision an application like this being used in the classroom.

Looks interesting, we've created a similar free Web IDE for server-side JavaScript - <a href="http://www.erbix.com/js/" rel="nofollow">http://www.erbix.com/js/</a> . We'd love if you take it for a spin and give us any feedback you might have :)

An iPad-friendly layout would be interesting.

I saw several online-IDEs, but none offloads hosting to Google. What a great idea.

Didn't Heroku have something similar to this a few years ago?

Is it me or is founding investor of Napster an odd title?

"All your code are belong to us!". Somehow a web IDE doesn't seem to make much sense.

I suspect that using this product will be a punishment for not knowing Emacs or Vim.