Koding (koding.com) is a cool new application that allows coding and development in the cloud. It’s particularly handy as a WordPress development environment; one that is reached even when you are on the road and your computer is safe at home.

Koding Features

Koding is much more than just coding and development; it’s a social network and hub for developers to share code snippets, best practices, and to improve the overall level of coding across the web.

Users can join groups and follow topics, each which have its own activity feeds jammed with status updates and code snippets from member developers. Interests and activity feeds can be filtered by topic, snippet, autor, links, and more.

Need a snippet that helps modify the WordPress loop? Send a note in the activity stream for the WordPress group and get a comment back from any one of the more than 20,000 current members online, or nearly 1,000 members in the WordPress group alone.

You can even open that code snippet right in your very own editor, and future versions of the app will allow you to save the snippet in your favorites library.

The Koding development environment, called the “Ace” editor, rivals most premium editors on the market with all the major features of a premium code editor including:

• line numbers
• code wrapping
• auto-complete code
• tabbed file browsing
• file tree manager
• syntax modes
• code folding
• color management
• live preview
• and much, much more

 

Apps within the APP

Koding allows linking to a github repository where you can store extra files for development. They’re also working on adding more functionality to make it a one-stop-shop for everything code and development related.

This includes adding the usage of other third-party apps within Koding’s own windows, including CodeMirror, yMacs, and Pixlr; apps which should make for more efficient file insertion into the development work flow.

WordPress in the Cloud

By now, you’re thinking…”this all sounds nice, but why are we reading about it on WPMU.org?” WordPress in the cloud is nothing new, you’ve been able to do it with server services like Amazon, Rackspace, and others.

But there are a few, not so subtle differences.

• Currently, Koding is a free service – ALL the others are fee based, and charge not only for storage but for bandwidth as well.
• Koding gives you a virtual machine with terminal and ftp access, which means you can install myphpAdmin.
• Koding gives you the ability to install SQL databases.

The 3 of those together mean you can install a working version of WordPress – completely in the cloud, and completely free….for now.

It took me just a few minutes to set up a new WordPress environment, install a few WPMUDEV plugins, and get this Real Estate Based business directory running smoothly. (By the way, that functionality is courtesy of our Directory Plugin, which was recently updated with some cool features.)

 

 

How to Access the Koding Application

Koding is offered as an app through Google Chrome Web store and through a normal web browser.

Up until now, the app had been in private beta with only a select few developers having access. It’s out of private beta now, but access is invite only, much like how Google’s social network started just a few short months ago.

Overall, Koding is much more than just cloud coding. It’s a development network that promises to reshape the way we code and create web applications. I’ve found its members to be supportive and very collaborative.

Visit Koding.com and get on the invite list.

Tags:

• developers