Rate our pivot : PythonAnywhere

[tartley]

We recently posted a 'Rate our Pivot', for Project Dirigible, our Python-based spreadsheet web-application. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304691)

We received some great responses and excellent advice. The thing that people found the most interesting was the 'effortless cloud supercomputing' aspect, while being least engaged by the spreadsheet-UI.

So we trimmed the application to provide something more focused. The result is PythonAnywhere - a interactive Python console in the browser, that runs your code on our servers.

http://pythonanywhere.com

The user's code runs in a sandbox, to guard against griefers.

We're not tied to Python - in a later version, the server-side process could be anything, from Ruby to a Bash shell.

Casual use is free, like Dropbox, and we would charge for more resource-intensive services, maybe access to networking, or for access to substantial CPU time or disk space.

Prospective users have requested:

- Persistent sessions, so you can close your session but then pick it up from another device later on, with screen content, command-line history, and Python context intact.

- Server-side storage / Integration with Dropbox or Github or other DVCS hosts.

- Shared console sessions, so two or more users can work in the same session, maybe for tutoring, or possibly for remote pairing.

- Providing many different Python versions, all loaded with packages from PyPI, so users could try things out without any local install or config.

- Providing a grid computing API, to run users' code across several of our EC2 instances.

- An editor.

We've just gone live today with a limited private beta, in which multiple users can share persistent sessions.

We'd appreciate any feedback at all, but we're particularly interested in:

- Features that would make it useful to you.

- Features that you would pay for.

- How well we're presenting our case.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated -- thanks in advance!

[wladimir]

I think the idea is certainly neat. I guess it's very useful if you need a lot of bandwidth/CPU power when working from a mobile device.

So the idea is that you provide grid computing support from Python and an in-the-cloud IDE? Like a "matlab in the cloud"?

In that case, a very important feature would be chart drawing support, and ways to import/export data.

[tartley]

Hey. Thanks for the comment. Yep. Right now the beta only works on regular OS & browsers, and on the Nokia N900, but we still have some work to do on Android, and have yet to test on iOS, but theoretically we have no known incompatible tech.

We hadn't thought about chart drawing, but it seems to make good sense. Thanks!

We're constantly brainstorming about the best ways to import and export source and data. We're currently thinking about Dropbox or Github integration, or maybe a very lightweight client-end component which simply allows you to sync the current directory to your PythonAnywhere server-side storage.

[iworkforthem]

easy to click: http://pythonanywhere.com

[gpjt]

Thanks! If anyone could tell us how to make clickable links in ask-HN-style posts, we'd be eternally grateful :-)