Sharable Apptron Environments
Apptron is the first of a new category of general-purpose compute platform with over 5 years of R&D behind it. In these early releases, Apptron is starting out as a humble, local-first IDE. It is a development environment powered by Wanix, a new Plan 9 inspired runtime for WebAssembly, which allows you to run Wasm and x86 programs in a full Linux environment that works entirely in the browser without cloud compute.
Similar to Smalltalk, Apptron is designed to be a live editable, malleable environment that can become much more than a software IDE. This is an idea that will become more clear in time. To that end, Apptron is initially focusing on the means to share itself and what you can create with it.
Apptron v0.5 Release
This release introduces basic project visibility and sharing, allowing you to keep a project private, or share a project and its environment via URL. The initial public release was only a few weeks ago, so this release also includes a number of basic improvements. Most notably:
- 2x performance increase in load time for environments
- Full Safari support, resolving an issue that degraded Safari to read-only
- Improved Git support, resolving an issue that corrupted repository cloning
- A number of miscellaneous UX improvements
Apptron is still quite new and incomplete, but it is open source and self-hostable. We'd appreciate any roadmap suggestions, bug reports, and contributions. One issue we could use help with is investigating slow network performance in our virtual network gateway.
Our next sprint will likely focus on "publish" functionality, letting project environments export web assets to a separate, public URL. Secondarily, we'll be finishing port access, letting arbitrary programs listening on the virtual network to be accessed by a public endpoint, a la Ngrok. We'll also continue work improving performance.
There is a lot of work behind us and still ahead, which would not be possible without our GitHub Sponsors. We believe this is the future of sustainable community software development, and if you agree then we'd love to have you join us.
Full Changelog: https://github.com/tractordev/apptron/commits/v0.5.0