A Better Web-Based IDE

After a few days this week without Chrome OS due to a fun error in the Dev build (though its never bad to be able to revert to Ubuntu), I am able to be a Cr-48 nerd again.  The other day one of the three readers of this blog tipped me off on Akshell, another online development environment, which I quickly dove into in order to compare it against some of my other favorites which I have checked out previously here, here, and here.  By far my favorite has been Kodingen, I still go to it to code around and generally geek it up.  This all may change.

Akshell is a brilliant development environment that utilizes JavaScript for not only the client-side programming, but also the Server-side.  There are many cool features to how apps are developed and integrated in Akshell, which can be found in their documentation here.  I have found the environment to be amazing to use utilizing the default "ak" library and their Model-View-Controller framework.  For my first test I tried to remake (and improve) the test site I created on Kodingen with Akshell.  I found it was super fast to build with the Akshell environment and enabled me to test and preview just as smoothly as Kodingen though I think the interface with Akshell is much easier to navigate (perhaps because most of the features in Kodingen are still disabled in its current Beta state).  I must admit that I did utilize jsFiddle to quickly enhance my HTML5 canvas that I had created in Kodingen and then simply copied the JavaScript to Akshell.  So what does a quick Akshell site look like?  See mine here.

One of the promising things about Akshell that I'll be getting into soon, is their relational database (PostgreSQL) that is accessible with their "Simple JavaScript API".  From the documentation and the quick test I did with their relation variables I have to agree it is simple to use.  I hope to get some time to get an app going that utilizes this database functionality soon.

I don't know if I like Akshell an better than Kodingen as far as functionality and features (they both let you code, use a database, and deploy directly within their apps) but I can say that Akshell seems to be a more elegant solution to the online coding environment so I will definitely be using it for my next online coding endeavor.