I have to say Cloud 9 is kind of cool. Its a online IDE targeted mainly for scripting languages. It will be interesting to see what happens to that company and what there exit plan is (or not).

Whether Cloud 9 succeeds or not, programming in the cloud seems like a very possible future. As a on-and-off freelance software developer the idea is appealing in terms of context shifting and knowledge transfer.

I’m currently using hosted vmware images which I remote desktop into for my current gig. Its nice because the current setup for their development environment is complicated. With the VMware image I was immediately productive (granted it is a Windows and I prefer Linux).

The other interesting Developer SAS company that I have found is Cloud Bees. They provided hosted continuous integration. I have long wanted this for my open source projects.

Both companies I guess have to defend the question: “Why not just setup a Rackspace or Amazon image and install the software?”