Developer outfit Nitrous.io has raised a small but crucial round of funding to support the further development of its IDE (integrated development environment).

Nitrous.io (previously Action.io) enables developers write (and fix) code from any web browser. It’s an idea that’s been floating around for a while, and many founders have executed it with varying degrees of success in the past.

Here’s a quick demo:

Right now, the product is free. Pricing for pro features has yet to be announced. Currently, Nitrous supports Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, Node.js, and Go. More languages and technologies are expected to be added soon.

“Founders Peter Jihoon Kim, AJ Solimine, and Arun Thampi came up with the idea for Nitrous.IO when having trouble keeping their own development environments in sync across their team and on both their home and work computers,” a company rep wrote in an emailed statement.

“They wanted a way for anyone on the team to be able to jump into the codebase immediately without having to wrestle with updating software packages or installing new libraries.”

The startup has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. Part of the new funding will be used to hire (specifically, a generalist and a dev-ops person).

Today’s cash infusion was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Draper Associates, TIBCO Software, Facebook Co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures, and several others.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Investors are green with Codenvy. Today, the startup which provides a cloud-based environment to code, build, and test apps, announced that it closed $9 million in its first round of funding.

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the world of IT. Business operations from tracking sales leads to finance management are increasingly going airborne due to the cloud’s flexibility, 24-hour access, and lower cost. However, many developers still work on their desktops, which can limit their productivity.

“The Integrated Development Environemnt (IDE) model for application development hasn’t changed in four decades,” said CEO Tyler Jewell in a statement. “It’s so pervasive, the IT industry has become complacent to its severe limitations.”

Codenvy’s solution requires no downloading to access the full stack browser environment, with multiple language and framework options. The company claims developers can gain up to two additional hours of coding time each day through features like “always-on workspaces, parallel multicore compilation, continuous iterative deponent, and multicursor pair programming.” Teams can also share their workspaces to facilitate collaboration.

Programming teams can use Codenvy to run and test their applications, go through the complete “build lifecycle” (validate, compile, test, package, and deploy), and edit code in the browser. Integration partners include GitHub, ReHat Openshift, Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Heroku, and AppFog. The company has 50,000 registered developers. The service is free for public projects and otherwise involves a monthly subscription free ranging from a $9 a month “secure” option for five private projects to Codenvy Enterprise, which carries a variable, case-by-case pricing basis.

Toba Capital led this $9 million round, with participation from Auriga Partners and a number of angel investors. Codenvy was formerly known as Exo IDE and is based in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Mike Saechang

Now stop imagining and just watch the video below.

I just interviewed Kent Mitchell, Zend’s senior director of product management. Zend, of course, is the company that makes the most-used PHP development environment. It’s the company started by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the primary originators of the PHP language (after founder Rasmus Lerdorf).

PHP jockies out there will be impressed, I think, to find that Mitchell is not just a marketing drone … he’s a full-on, hard-core, honest-to-goodness developer.

And given that Zend just announced the ability to create mobile apps directly within Zend Studio, I challenged him to show me how it works, from start to finish.

I think when you’ll watch that you will find he came pretty damn close:

As Mitchell says, “In just a few minutes, I’ve created a new web service, I’ve deployed it into the cloud, and I’ve created some new widgets on this mobile site. Now, we want to turn around and make this a native application.”

And he does, in just a few more clicks, create a project that is tied to the Xcode tools that iOS developers would normally use to create native apps. The same functionality, of course, is possible for Android applications.

Frankly, this is pretty amazing.

While creating apps, developers can test and view their apps right on their development machine, and integrated debugging is included. It’s an over-used expression, but this is a game-changer for developers and enterprises.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

New: watch a PHP developer create a native mobile app in 10 minutes.

This morning at ZendCon, Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans announced that Zend Studio 10 will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps right from the language they know best, PHP. The new capability includes a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project’s Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration so developers can publish native app packages to the various app stores.

Zend CEO Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

This is a major game-changer for PHP developers, who until now have been shut out of the mobile app revolution. Apps for iPhone and iPad are coded in Objective-C, while apps for Google’s Android mobile operating system are built in Java. This new announcement means that millions of new developers have just been invited to the mobile development party.

“We’re the only vendor that is really taking a really strong approach on this,” Gutmans told me last week in a sneak preview. “This is a seamless development experience.”

This new capability, Gutmans said, allows developers to build out backend code and front-end interface at the same time. That’s actually the hard part, according to Zend SMO Elaine Lennox.

“Modern apps connect to multiple different back-end systems such as CRM systems, cloud services, and social networks. With all these different data services in lot of different places, wiring them together can be harder to build than the app,” she said. “But now, a developer can go into Zend studio, create the front-end with a WYSIWYG interface builder, and connect it all on the backend.”

But it’s not just about mobile.

Instead, Gutman’s vision is about two massive revolutions: mobile and cloud. The new Zend Server is built for cloud, whether developers use Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, or other clouds. In the new development architecture, apps access clouds, which then access APIs, social services, or SaaS options such as Salesforce.

“We’re giving you a common workflow between client and cloud for building mobile apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re defining a new architecture: cloud service architecture. I think it’s completely a first … I haven’t seen it before.”

Source: Zend

Zend’s view of the mobile app

Andi Gutmans, who is also one of the primary authors of the PHP language, had hinted at new mobile options for PHP developers to VentureBeat three weeks ago.

Zend and PHP have made significant inroads into the enterprise market in the last few years — Gutmans told me that “when we go up against Java or .Net, we win — and the new integrated development environment for mobile, cloud, and business applications is part of a new mobile-first push for the company.

Citing a study saying that mobile development projects will outnumber PC-focused projects by four to one, and that the world will have 7.4 billion mobile devices by 2015, Gutmans wants to help enterprises create “composite” apps, apps that combine intelligence from internal business systems, external networks and applications, and personalizations to individual users.

The new Zend Studio will allow drag-and-drop connection to various cloud services as well as the visual creation of mobile interfaces, allowing developers to manage all the components of development for complex, connected mobile apps up in one interface.

“We’re bringing mobile and cloud together,” Gutmans said.

And that’s going to give PHP developers — and PHP-using enterprises — a massive new opportunity to use familiar tools to create new experiences for users in the office, and out.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cloud9, a cloud-based app-development startup, closed a $5.5 million first round of funding from Accel Partners and Atlassian Software, the company announced today.

Cloud9 is a web-based programming environment for developers to create and run both web and mobile applications written in JavaScript and HTML5. The service is hosted in the cloud and lets developers access, build, edit, test, debug and share projects.

Previously, Mozilla’s SkyWriter online development environment merged with the Cloud9 service, which was also recently used for the first cloud development environment for Google Chrome OS, as well as the integration with GitHub, BitBucket and other environments.

The company said it will use the funding to consolidate its leadership in the emerging cloud-based Development as a Service (DaaS) segment of the $8B app development market. Cloud9 also plans to expand
its Amsterdam-based development team with a new U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Ajax (the company that presented Cloud9) is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event.