This is a guest post by Jesse Williams, an all round stellar guy and the marketing director at Codenvy. I wrote about Codenvy a long time ago in my article Five Best Online IDEs back when Codenvy was still named Cloud IDE. A lot has changed since then, and not just their name. They have grown into a formidable online cloud IDE platform, enabling developers the world over.

I figured it would be a great idea to get to know them a bit better and see what it is they have to offer us Chromebook warriors. So on my request Jesse took to his Chromebook and wrote the below article to do just that, inform us about Codenvy.

If you haven’t picked out your Chromebook yet, check out the in-depth buying guide here: Best Chromebook for Developers.

In case you might wonder if this is a paid infomercial to the better glory of my own personal gain and wallet, wonder no more, it is not. It’s just here to inform us.

So I would say: Thanks, and take it away Jesse…

For developers, Chromebooks offer an appealing mix of portability and affordability in a package that retains the keyboard and large screen that are critical for coding. In fact, many Codenvy developers use Chromebooks extensively. So when the latest Pixel was released we wondered how much Chromebook usage on our SaaS offering had grown over the preceding year – turns out it was 82%, far higher than we’d expected!

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised though. Over the last year we’ve also seen many new cloud IDEs come to market – enough that at 3 years old, we’re starting to look like the elder statesman of the market! We love cloud development so we’re excited to see the attention and growth in this market.

Within the market, however, our approach has always been a little different: Codenvy is a developer workspace cloud that accelerates continuous delivery by removing the need for developers to configure their environment.

We have always focused on big, complex projects like the eXo Chat Maven multi-module project. For Chromebook users, Codenvy’s cloud developer workspaces provide the ability to code enterprise level projects without having to transition back to heavy desktops or laptops. Codenvy works with any linux language including Java, JavaScript, Node.JS, PHP, Go, and Android, just to name a few.

Our project typing mechanism means that developers can: Use as many machines as they need – for complex projects this is a must as a project will often rely on separate middleware, APIs, databases, etc….

Access ready-to-build and run workspaces – for example, an Angular.js project can take advantage of Grunt automatically, while a Java project comes ready to deploy to Tomcat, JBoss or Glassfish (among other application servers). Share a quarantined copy of their project with anyone through a single URL.

We’ve tried to automate most of what a developer needs because we built Codenvy to try and remove the constant configuration and updating demanded by the developer’s local machine. With Codenvy, you simply open the development environment in a browser, import a project from GitHub, BitBucket, or a zip file, and start coding. Your dependencies will automatically be downloaded, your compiler is ready to go, and debug environments are pre-installed. Of course, because we’re based on Docker you can always add in your own totally custom machine recipe through a Dockerfile – even one pulled from DockerHub.

The ability to develop on a Chromebook is only a starting point with Codenvy. Codenvy also adds value to any development team because we offer both a SaaS and on-premises version. The latter is used by many of our enterprise customers so that they can get a fully automated developer workspace cloud behind their firewall and connected to their own systems. Our Codenvy On-Prem offering even allows custom plugins to be built and deployed. Plugins are based on Eclipse Che which is an open source SDK and cloud IDE that is part of the Eclipse Foundation’s Cloud Development project.

You can check out Codenvy in the Chrome web store which boasting over 500 reviews and 4 1/2 stars.