Devunity is a collaborative coding platform that allows developers to simultaneous view and modify code on their browser without having to download a client. The service has built-in support for a number of popular APIs, allowing users to simply click on one of the options to generate the relevant framework in their code.
After developing a program on Devunity, the platform will suggest a number of cloud-based services like Google’s App Engine for deployment (though users will be free to use their own servers). Devunity will be free for open source projects, but plans to charge for private programs (the company hopes to lure developers in this way).
Users can use a built-in commenting system to annotate their projects, and the site plans to introduce chat rooms for real time conversation. There’s no immediate need to keep track of versioning, but users can choose to use SVN if they’d like.
During its TechCrunch50 presentation (watch here), Devunity used its software to demonstrate how simple it was to generate a TC50 latest news aggregator.
Expert Panelists
Josh Kopelman – What do you guys do?
Tim O’Reilly – I have to say I had a hard time following.. I get it’s an online dev tool using APIs. How do you turn this into a company?
Devunity – It’s a collaborative coding environment, don’t have to download anything done online using cloud services. It’s not just for cloud, we encourage to deploy to cloud, but we support ftp servers…
Can be called a “google docs for developers”
Tim O’Reilly – Do you imagine a 37signals business model?
Devunity – Yes, we’re also going to white label platform, if they want to offer it using their API, like mobile companies can have this tailor made dev environment to write applications deployed to their services.
Tim O’Reilly – Back to 37signals.. they obviously have this PR win with Ruby On Rails.. got them press, how do you get this visibility to get developers in the door?
Devunity – You can go in the service, it is free for open source community. Free for open source gets them hooked.
Jason Calacanis – What’s the #1 problem that you solve? What sucks about being a developer?
Devunity – You aren’t in contact with other devs.. you can ask what the guy nextdoor is doing.. they don’t have any collaboration around their code
Evan Williams – I have questions but they’re complicated. You said you don’t have to deal with versioning, but there’s a reason for it.. do you have branching? are you just writing code and producing to production?
Devunity – We’re using svn, there is version tracking, you don’t have to check code in.
Evan Williams – is there developer environment you’re running on before you deploy to server
Devunity – we upload to Google App Engine, that’s our dev server. We’re looking at doing google gears..
Om Malik – Would you use something like this?
Evan Williams – i doubt it. It would be hard to change. the benefits are probably for more dispersed teams