These days, launching an app—particularly one that is supposed to seamlessly work over mobile, web, and desktop—feels a little like building a Rube Goldberg machine. You have to navigate a complex landscape, piecing together a tech stack for bootstrapping, compiling, testing, deploying, and monitoring your app.
Even though Google has been working for years to make our lives easier while working on multi-platform app development through tools like Angular, Flutter, Google Cloud, and Firebase, we believe there is still so much more that has to be done all the way from top to bottom. A few months ago, we started the experiment with new ways, so today we are pleased to introduce the new project—Project IDX.
Project IDX is a Google Cloud Workstations-based browser development environment for building with an AI model named Codey, developed from PaLM 2. It is crafted to simply develop, control, and deploy full-stack web and multiple-platform applications using well-liked frameworks and languages. Based on Code OSS, Project IDX gives you a native experience with whatever you’re building.
We’re sharing Project IDX today in order to get your feedback from the developer community on what we can do to help improve your workflow. Here’s a peek at what Project IDX can do to power your efforts.
Project IDX is built to let you develop anywhere on any device with full power of a local development. Every Project IDX workspace provides the power of a Linux-based VM with the ease of being cloud-hosted in a data center near you.
Import projects that already exist, or start new ones:
You can import projects in from GitHub to pick up right where you left off, or create new projects using pre-configured templates for popular frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte, and Vue, as well as languages like JavaScript and Dart. Support for additional languages including Python and Go coming soon. We’re also really interested in your suggestions for more frameworks and project types to support.
Multi-Platform Preview:
To make your application truly multi-platform, Project IDX has a built-in web preview feature. It will soon be further supported by a completely configured Android emulator and an inbuilt iOS simulator — all from right within your current browser.
AI Assistance:
Next-level productivity in coding Newer AI is providing new possibilities for increasing productivity in coding. Project IDX makes use of Google’s proprietary AI, like Codey and the PaLM 2 models, so you can avail yourself of coding smarter and faster, while maintaining quality. This includes smart code completion, an assistant chatbot, and contextual actions for commenting and explaining code. We’re always working to make these AI capabilities even more supportive for you.
Easy Deployment with Firebase Hosting:
This can be one of the more challenging steps in deploying your app, but Project IDX integrates with Firebase Hosting to make things breeze-easy. Just one click is all it takes to deploy a shareable preview of your web app or go live with the secure, fast, and globally available hosting platform. Firebase Hosting also supports dynamic backends through Cloud Functions, so it’s ideal for static websites and full-stack frameworks like Next.js.
