In August 2023, a small group of Google development and UX leads bewailed the difficulty of setting up a development environment for multiplatform and full-stack apps, and offered their take on an experimental prototype intended to solve the issues. Difficulty setting up technology stacks for development is not a new problem. It has been an issue since at least the early 1980s, when personal computers became available.
Project IDX is a browser-based development environment built on Code OSS and powered by Codey, a generative AI foundation model trained on code and built on PaLM 2. Project IDX is designed to make it easier to build, manage, and deploy full-stack web and multiplatform applications, using popular frameworks and languages.
Code OSS is the fully open-source version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. The latter has a few proprietary additions, despite being free software.
At the time of its announcement in August, Project IDX was only available through a waitlist sign-up; my application was finally approved in December. Project IDX is still very much a rough-edged preview, but has an interesting design and some utility, even if it’s not yet intended for use in a production environment.
There are several products that compete with Project IDX at some level. These include AWS Cloud9, Gitpod, Online IDE, Replit, StackBlitz, Eclipse Che, Codeanywhere, and GitHub Codespaces.
Feels like Visual Studio Code
There are a number of features that make Project IDX look promising despite its rough edges and its feel of being under construction. For starters, it’s actually a familiar environment for anyone who uses Visual Studio Code. As I understand it, the portions of VS Code that aren’t included in Code OSS are the Microsoft-specific customizations, which don’t matter too much in this context.
Some of those customizations are replaced by the IDX AI powered by Codey. The IDX AI provides code suggestions as you type and offers an AI-powered code chat you can ask for help with your code, to generate new code, to translate code to another language, to explain code, and to write unit tests. Supposedly, IDX AI also highlights possible license requirements based on AI-generated code, although I haven’t seen that pop up.
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Project IDX will feel familiar because of its similarity to VS Code. The top left “hamburger” menu replaces the top row menu in VS Code, and offers most of the same menu items when it pops out. The icons in the vertical row below that control the contents of the next column to the right, currently showing the file explorer, the code outline for the current file, the timeline for the current file, and the dependencies for the app. The large editing pane currently showing main.dart can display up to four tabs. The preview window to the right can also display the IDX AI pane and additional code file tabs. The large area at the bottom right displays code problems, output, a debug console, and a terminal.
Runs in a cloud workstation
The IDX Code OSS editor runs in a Google Cloud VM, called a Cloud Workstation. Normally, Cloud Workstation time is billed per hour at a rate that varies with the size of the machine type, from $0.16/hour to $9.36/hour. Project IDX is currently free.
Normally, Cloud Workstations support a variety of popular IDEs and Duet AI. Project IDX supports only Code OSS, and Codey instead of Duet. (I can’t tell you the difference between Duet AI and Codey in practice, although it might be an interesting comparison to investigate.) Cloud Workstations can normally run inside your private network and in your staging environment. Project IDX is currently restricted to its own environment.
Supports many languages and frameworks
You can create projects in Project IDX with built-in templates and GitHub imports. The templates support the JavaScript, TypeScript, and Dart languages and the Angular, React, NextJS, Vue, Svelte, and Flutter frameworks. In the future, Project IDX is due to support Python, Go, and “AI.” You can optionally use Nix to customize your workspace.
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This menu offers you your initial choice of the kind of app you’ll generate or import. Each item (other than the “coming soon” group at the bottom) opens a secondary screen for specifying your app framework and naming your app.
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The second-level screen for generating a new web app currently offers a choice of six web frameworks. They are Angular, React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, or a blank app, which implies writing your own HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript, and CSS. Nix is the file you can use to customize a workspace.
Integrates with Git and GitHub
GitHub imports can be of three types: web, Flutter, and “other,” which currently appears to mean JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks other than those explicitly listed. The frameworks explicitly supported include Angular, React, Next.js, Vue, and Svelte.
If your GitHub project has JavaScript dependencies, you can run npm install in your IDX terminal window after your import completes. You can also turn your project into a Git repository from within IDX and sync that with GitHub.
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Project IDX integrates well with Git and GitHub. At left, you can see the options to initialize a Git repository and publish it to GitHub.
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Once you have created a repo and authenticated to GitHub, Project IDX can push the repo to GitHub. Here you can see the typical GitHub display of the README.md file generated for the app by Angular.
Previews, deploys, and shares apps
In addition to a web preview, Project IDX presents previews in Android emulators and iOS simulators, where supported by the underlying template. All three work for a Flutter app. Only two, web preview and iOS simulator, work for an Angular app, since a stock Angular app isn’t native unless you add something like Ionic or NativeScript.
You can deploy directly from your workspace to Firebase hosting. On an experimental basis, you can share your workspace with complete shared access.
Project IDX comes with pre-installed extensions for the languages and frameworks it supports. It is supposed to support additional extensions that are available from OpenVSX, although I can’t confirm whether all of those work at this point—there are just too many (over 3,000) to check.
One current major limitation of Project IDX is that only two projects are allowed at once. You can get around this by saving projects to GitHub and juggling which you have open in IDX.
The Flutter app reported two setup errors. Here I am trying to resolve one of them with the help of IDX AI. Unfortunately, the AI’s advice to use sudo apt-get to install Chrome turned out to be useless, since the IDX VM does not currently include either sudo or apt-get. I won’t call that a hallucination, since those utilities might be planned for a future version.
Lives in the Google Cloud
Project IDX shows a lot of promise. It’s visually similar to Visual Studio Code for the Web (which, sadly, lacks a terminal and debugger). It’s both visually and functionally similar to GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod, and it’s functionally similar to Eclipse Che.
One reason you might prefer Project IDX to any of those would be its hosting in a Google Cloud Workspace, which is a big advantage if you want to integrate with any Google Cloud services, or with other programs you have running in the Google Cloud. On the other hand, if your existing code runs on AWS, you might want to consider using AWS Cloud9.
My biggest concern about making a commitment to Project IDX would be Google’s long history of killing its projects and services. Remember Google+? Freebase? The Google Search Appliance? Polymer? Google Domains? All ex-parrots, they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
Nevertheless, Project IDX has its attractions. As long as you create a GitHub repository from your workspace and keep it current, it’s certainly worth a try.
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