We originally designed Kite for django/rails/node/static html. But then Ghost was released.
Devs can use Kite to host a Ghost blog but also edit its underlying code without having to worry about setting it up locally and then pushing it somewhere else. We're really hoping that this makes contributing to the Ghost codebase & designing themes way easier.
Thanks for checking it out - there's a pricing page once you log in. Sorry that it's not very transparent right away - we'll get that fixed up.
We give away one hosted dev environment for free and charge 10$/month per app you want to build with it afterwards. The pricing amount is definitely not fixed - we just started our beta and wanted to hear thoughts from the HN community regarding the whole concept / experience.
We've included as much cross-platform code as possible in the client so we can start supporting Windows ASAP. I can't give an exact date but we're working hard on it.
The Youtube live video from last night doesn't seem to be available anymore, but according to http://www.docker.io/live/, a better version of the videos should be up by the end of the day. I'll fix the post.
Great question - file syncing in general can lead to so many problems. We're working on making it play well for single developers with multiple clients/workstations. Our goal is to really provide an awesome infrastructure to host your dev environment that you can access from anywhere. Conflicts could still arise with a single developer as they work on different machines, but we're trying to make it easy to merge work, such as in the case where one of your machines gets out of sync but still has unpushed changes made to the workspace.
At this point we're not focusing on collaboration between developers. There are incredible companies like GitHub whose core mission is to make code collaboration an amazing experience, and we really want to help developers leverage this while not worrying about environment, config & setup issues.
We wanted zero setup for devs who may just want to get something up and running right away. The video shows the basics, and we definitely realize there is much more to building a web app than that.
We want to make configuring your app and using common services easy without Kite getting in the way. That’s our mission. Although we showed direct shell access to your app in the video, our end goal is to give developers a machine they can call home as their development environment - root access and all.
For databases, we’re making it a simple click to bind a database to your app. Similar to Heroku, we plan to expose different options as a service and they will be connected to your app through the dj_database_url python module (for Django). For beginners, we’ll try to edit your settings to help make this seamless (your settings.py files in this case).
For other services such as email, task queues like Celery, memcached, etc. we plan on taking a similar approach - offer it as a service on a separate machine that can be easily added to your app, or alternatively just install it in your environment if its something very lightweight or serverless (like sqlite).
Like other hosting services we’ll provide storage for things like storing user media, static files.
We’re really aiming to start with development, since there’s this large gap between development and prod that creates serious time-wasting problems that each member of our team has felt. Companies like Heroku are solving the production problem very well, but developers are still left to setup their own environment and deal with problems leading up to prod.
That being said, we see the serious benefit in using the same stack for development & production, and, like others have mentioned, testing, staging, CI. It’s definitely on our mind, and we’d love to see this kind of fragmentation disappear.
Great to see that you’re interested, and we’ll definitely be following up with you soon.
Sorry for the delay in answering and thanks for the comment. This is a good question.
Our video is indeed starting a django project for you - we take a step further and let you do that in a click without having to set up a virtualenv, and it's all hosted. This is the basics, but the idea is to move your development onto a hosted server that is the same or much closer to your prod environment.
Ideally, this hosted environment can offer you much more than what you get by installing a different version of everything you’ll be using in production onto your laptop.
Thanks - we really want to stay out of your way while taking care of the common pains of web development.
So in the case of git, you can keep using VCS just like before - place your local files in a repo and use the Github app / command line. Our goal is for you to continue to use the workflow you're used to.
Good to hear - I’ve definitely visited gem dependency hell, and been to companies where you had to fight for a staging server. We hope to make Kite a great way to both host your work but also test & stage it in a linux box to avoid any gotchas from developing on a different environment than your prod machines.
While PageKite definitely offers a great way to expose your local web app to others, we want to get rid of the local setup process altogether, so developers can just spin up an environment using our service and start working from their favorite machine.
Our initial target is newer web developers who may find the setup process daunting, or developers who may manage several projects but don’t want to worry about about the details behind setting up different web frameworks and adding new services. As many can attest, setting up Rails isn’t exactly easy, and it can be even worse if you’re not familiar with the command line, or don’t have xcode installed.
We're definitely working on ways to allow developers to work privately and avoid publishing by default.
We currently host development environments so seeing this on the front page was a bit crazy. We just couldn't handle the load.
Sorry about that - working on making it better.