Designing IDE as a Service

While the popularity of web applications is growing, most of the software is still developed using desktop tools. Nevertheless, a browser-based development environment could offer a multitude of advantages. For example, only an up-to-date web browser is needed and therefore the user has no need to carry out complex tool installation and update procedures. Furthermore, publishing the applications to the web is easy to offer as a feature of an IDE, and since the users are already connected via server, collaborative features are easier to implement. For beginning businesses, effortless publishing offers new possibilities. In this paper, we present Arvue, a browser-based tool that enables simple development and publishing of web applications. Arvue applications are created on the browser using a user interface designer and an integrated code editor. The applications are stored in a version control system provided by Arvue and they can easily be published to the cloud. Publishing the user-created applications may impose resource usage and security issues, which are also addressed in the paper.