For big companies having a completely non-local dev environment actually works pretty amazingly. It's something that I've been trying to set up at home with Eclipse Che. The workflow is great. I can switch between laptops, desktops, etc with no changes. I can run really large jobs from my phone and come back to my desk an hour or two later to see if my code worked right. I can do all of this without installing anything on my local system.
The funny thing is that I remember doing exactly this with PHP in the early 2000’s on a small team. We didn’t even have version control on the project and just did all of the development in vim, relying on its lock files to ensure we didn’t edit the same files at the same time. Deployed changes with rsync.
That project ran in an enterprise environment, customer facing for 10 years with almost no maintenance.
Yep. It was also a project where we rolled our own...everything. This was an AJAX project before Prototype, jQuery or even JSON was popular so we had a lot of explicitly mapped paths and code that only didn’t exactly what was needed and verified every argument.
