One of the major open-source platforms for automated development environments, Gitpod, has announced that it is working on a new project, that is open-sourced under an MIT license. It is dubbed "OpenVSCode Server" and is an implementation of upstream, Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code), allowing it to run in a browser-based environment.
Co-founder and CEO of Gitpod, Sven Efftinge stated:
Over the last few months, we have been approached by multiple large organizations and individual developers asking how we run Gitpod’s ‘OpenVSCode Server’ implementation, as they wanted to adopt that approach within their own products and daily workflows. Microsoft didn’t yet publish the source code they use to enable GitHub Codespaces, but since we use the same low-footprint technique in Gitpod, we thought we might share this with everyone. My hope is that this eliminates the need for bad forks of VS Code that introduce unnecessary complexity.
With this project, companies and developers will be able to operate upstream and stable VS Code in the browser. It will also enable teams and developers to operate VS Code on servers that are cloud-powered and access it from any device with a browser.
CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Chris Aniszczyk stated:
Cloud-based development environments are quickly becoming a favored approach by cloud native developers to lower the barrier of contribution. As usual, Gitpod is at the forefront of delivering solutions that move the entire industry forward. Their new ‘OpenVScode Server’ project will certainly allow professional development teams to write code via a browser.
Development teams will also be able to access all the benefits of cloud-based IDEs in a vendor-neutral solution with the OpenVSCode Server open-source project. With Gitpod"s other project, vendor-neutral OpenVSX marketplace, individual developers and teams can utilize the "most popular IDE in the world" deployed on any machine, any time, together with access to all VS Code extensions. In addition, developers will have access to the most recent version of VS Code with low maintenance effort required along with an uncomplicated upgrade path.
Various technology firms such as TypeFox, Render, Tabnine, SUSE Rancher, Sourcegraph, SAP, RStudio, Uber, VMware, and GitLab are supporting partners in this initiative. For more information about Gitpod, head over to the dedicated webpage here and the GitHub repository here.