online Java IDE

Hi everybody,
I was just hoping to see what everybody thinks about the potential benefits of a web-based IDE (ala Eclipse). Obviously, this wouldn't be a good solution for "hard core" developers, but perhaps for hobby coding, students, etc, such a "light" IDE that doesnt require any downloads would be a good alternative.

A friend of mine is developing such an application for his honours project at university, so I am starting to do some research into the commercial viability of such an app

All comments appreciated!
Alex

Google is playing with online word processing and spreadsheets. Microsoft, with their .Net project, initially talked a lot about programs that just get started from the web. (Though they seem to pretty much have given up on the idea. At least I've heard nothing in a long time.)

In my opinion, an online IDE might be nice for just trying the language out a bit, but once I get to the level of making even small applications, like hobby coding, I definitely want that application on my computer, and more importantly, I want my files on my computer.

tanks for your response

The current version of the project lets users download a zip file containg all of the project files, allowing users to move their project into the offline world.

I agree with you though that this would probably be best suited to novices (and maybe students)

Perhaps providing some typ of automatic synch with the local machine can offer the benefits of local development without the need for a traditional IDE

Anyone else have any thoughts?

thanks again

Just curious would this compile and run code on the server or will it compile on the server for them to download and run locally? I'm really just interested in knowing the kind of affect really bad or malicious would have.

The code would compile on the host, and let the user download the resulting class files.

Not sure how much, if any risk, there would be in the case of only allowing server-side compilation. Surely, the worst case is some compiler errors?