Putting Coder for Raspberry Pi through its paces

Exporting

You can export your work from Coder by using the gear menu and clicking on the Export button. Coder will give you a ZIP file that you can download to you computer.

What do you do with your app once you have it on your hard disk? The app is so riddled with Coder-specific links that it won't run standalone unless you subject it to an intensive de-weeding and rewriting. If you're going to go down that road, you may as well have developed your app on a regular text editor. The only sane thing to do is, if you create an app on Coder, run it on Coder and serve it from there (platform lock-in, anyone?).

You can't push your app to a public front end when you're done either, mainly because no public front end exists for Coder. Everything is locked behind the password screen.

Conclusion

Coder, at least in its present form, does not bring much to the table in the way of helping build web apps. As a programmer who codes first and then bashes said code into submission with all the debugging tools I can lay my hands on, I miss not having an in-IDE console, watches, steppers, and other heavy-duty wrenches and ratchets that help me get the job done.

Additionally, having the final result so tightly integrated with the platform is a deal-breaker for me, as is not being able to show the apps publicly. If this platform is going to be of any use, future versions should be able to export all the necessary bits within the downloadable zip, including a mini-server. And, it should just work when you deploy your app on your personal site or within another environment. Coder would also gain points if it were a little bit more useful, had a smart autocomplete option, or was aware of changes in the HTML page and could propagate these changes to the CSS and JS code.

Then again, Coder is a very young project, developed and maintained by a handful of Google developers. Maybe, with time, it will get better, and these sorts of things will be taken into account.