Show HN: Action.io - 0 to Rails in 60 seconds in your browser

This is how Heroku got started and they quickly figured out that the editor in the browser was an issue. No one liked it.

Wow, I'm very impressed. There is definitely a killer app for this, and that is Windows rails development. While it's better than it used to be, it's still far from ideal, and time consuming to set up. Love the idea of being able to use a consistent environment across multiple platforms. Great job; looking forward to playing with this!

Wow, I'm actually pretty sold.<p>One question though, is there delay when typing in the browser as there normally is when you ssh into a box? That kinda drives me up the walls, and I am an emacs person.

Hm. This is one of the rare times where a product actually does too much for me. If it gave me the ability to build and manage virtual envs for testing and development with ssh access (and maybe the ability to download them in say... vagrant box format) and nothing more, I would be sold immediately.<p>With the glossy IDE finish: not my thing :/.

When I first saw the logo, I heard:<p>"Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"

This looks technically very interesting (how did you do the terminal emulation, is that an OSS library?).<p>However I'm almost sure I don't want my Vim and terminals in the browser, there surely will be all sorts of quirks with copy/paste etc.<p>Can the remote filesystem be mounted so that we can just hack with our local terminals and editors?

Looks really good, I hope the rails beta goes smoothly because I would really love to have this for Django. Loved the demo!<p>PS. Why not: on console focus-loss -&#62; file browser auto refresh

At the risk of being negative, I'm really sick of Show HN entries that go to a page where you can signup to a 'early access' mailing list but not actually get into the product and use it.<p>What exactly do you have to show besides the marketing?

This looks extremely promising. Setting up and maintaining consistent dev environments are a time suck for any company. Companies like Quora are already doing this internally on EC2 (<a href="http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Quora" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/kstay/What-its-like-to-start-work-at-Qu...</a>).

The technology looks awesome but is this a pain point for people? I like developing on my local machine. Setting up an environment can be a pain but I only have to do it once. After that I forget about it.<p>Also, it worries me to depend on a third party service and my Internet connection to get work done.

This looks awesome. Congrats. Just wondering, why do you pick browser as the IDE? (as a background, I've been developing iPad IDE called Worqshop).<p>It's an honest question. How does the IDE perform using the iPad Safari? I thought about doing web-based IDE but found the performance very slow in my testing. Ultimately, it boils down to native vs web apps.<p>Nevertheless, kudos to you. I know that doing front-end web UI, dealing with AWS, and provisioning the boxes, are not trivial problems.<p>Edit: Just to preempt, yes, I know my app restricts developers to use iPad :)<p>Ups... reading the comments below... you will be providing SSH access to the VMs

I really like what you have done. Having transitioned from a Windows/Visual Studio .NET application development environment to an OS X and Rails development environment within the last year, this would have been very useful.

For those saying this isn't solving a serious problem: my colleagues and I have just spent weeks trying to get a reliable recipe for a Vagrant dev environment that encompasses our interesting (and in some cases a bit old) Rails-based tech. stack.<p>If we were starting again from scratch, we'd pretty much all agree to outsource most stuff: use Heroku, GitHub, etc. And there are several people intersted in Action.io now too.

This could be a really awesome pair programming tool if you could have real time collaboration ala Google Docs.

It looks really interesting, but one of the things I like about standard Rails dev work is I can work offline fairly easily. Mostly this a weird 'I have a really long commute' thing, so I will be keeping an eye on this.

60 seconds?! It took me at least 10 seconds of looking for a 60-second thing to work out that the shortest one of the things you can see that has some meaning is almost five minutes long. Am I missing something??

I just filled out a survey they emailed me and the thing I indicated as being most important was an online development system to support remote pair programming using tech like Apache Wave or Etherpad.

I really like what you've done. Personally, not for me, I prefer programming locally using emacs, but I think it'll be great for lots of people, it also looks good, nice design :)

I'll be sold when they give me access :) Seriously though, I have an old Laptop that I still keep around mainly because rails is "set up right" for some of my older projects

It looks nice, btw I thought it was something from <a href="http://iphone.appstorm.net/" rel="nofollow">http://iphone.appstorm.net/</a>, the icon/favicon is almost the same.

Interesting idea. If this takes off, I feel like it'll end up in every developer's toolbox. Nicely done guys, looking forward to seeing the product!

Maybe that will give Cloud9 a run for its money.

&#62;Run specs, change database configurations and tail logs like a boss...<p>That little tidbit made my day!

It isn't 60 seconds if I have to wait two weeks for an invite code...

email with a plus sign: "There was an error creating your invite, try again."

remote pairing with a graphical editor?<p>yes please.

the video is over 4 minutes..... just saying.

action.io - awesome product !!

Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference in mindset.<p>Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial?<p>I mean, the other end of the spectrum is to be focused purely on the obscure and utterly advanced, like category theorists trying to harness Haskell.<p>I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. (The middle of the proverbial road)<p>Meanwhile, we've got Rails (and I mean this separately of Ruby. The non-Rails Ruby community is much more like the rest of us) at one end of the spectrum, and Haskell/Clean/etc. at the other.<p>What the hell?