Online Tools for Web Developers

You have decided to become a web developer. You would normally want to get a shiny new laptop with Solid State Drives, latest processor from Intel or AMD and oodles of RAM. Its certainly exciting to do that, provided you have the Cash to digest the Cost.

Say you have a computer or laptop that your company has provided and you don’t have the Admin Rights to install the software you need. Lets say you have all these but you still face a final hurdle. You need to setup the development environment before you can start coding even a line in your favorite programming language.

I had this problem. I was frustrated to see myself installing every single pips and apt-gets and yums and npms and what not. My steam had run out and I quit learning. So if you picture yourself like me and want to get your hands on coding immediately then you are in for luck. I searched and searched and found few online playgrounds that range from simple code editors to full fledged development environment.

Development Environments

• 1. Cloud 9 Online Development Environment.
• 2. Sourcelair.
• 3. StackBlitz.
• 4. Code SandBox.

Cloud 9 from Amazon beats everything else in the list because it provides a terminal where you can install any package that you want. What this means is you can create a project in Django (say) and integrate Angular Code to get a complete project.

Stackblitz and Code SandBox are great for Front End stuff like Angular, React, Vue and few other Javascript frameworks. Code Sandbox has a slightly better UI, though thats only few nanometers more refined than Stackblitz. But Stackblitz shines in one area though its very minor again. Although both provide shareable public URL’s, stackblitz’s code changes are seen immediately in an external browser. Whereas for Code Sandbox, it happens after a refresh of the page. When it comes to in pane web page, both seem to show results immediately.