Wednesday, September 2, 2009

CodeNode - interactive online programming notebook

Just came across this today (via). CodeNode is a tool that lets you program interactively in your browser using Python or Sage, with an interface something like a Mathematica notebook. You can organize your code into multiple notebooks and folders.

I don't really see this as a replacement for an IDE, but it might be a very nice tool for collaborative code writing (e.g. during code sprints), for working when travelling and away from your main development machine, and for literate programming.

The nearest equivalent I can think of is Bespin, although I think that's just an online code editor, it doesn't let you run the code.

It might be nice to run a CodeNode instance at NeuralEnsemble, although it would probably be best on a separate server: I imagine you could quickly bring a server to its knees if you have many users at once, or large data sets. What do you think?


3 comments:

Unknown said...

Great link. Thanks.

I hope that this gets equipped with numpy, scipy,matplotlib.

Then we could develop our examples together.

Andrew Davison said...

I guess its up to you to install the packages you want on the same server as CodeNode. It mentions that it supports Sage, which includes Scipy, etc.

Alex Clemesha said...

Hi there, I'm one of the main developers of Codenode, and I wanted to say thanks for posting this!

Codenode is actively growing and if anyone has feedback or features they would really like to see, please feel free to post here: http://groups.google.com/group/codenode-devel, or just sign up to get the latest developments.

About the "gets equipped with numpy, scipy, matplotlib", Codenode "notebooks" are just python processes that can use any installed programs available, so a lot of this will already work. We have be discussing way to make creating "custom package environments", so maybe that would help solve your problem even better.

Thanks again!