We use Space due to GitLab's recent pricing changes.
We like:
- free git hosting
- free slack-like with sub-thread
- generous CI/CD
- built-in issue tracker
- built-in wiki
- very snappy
- has mobile app
We don't like:
- CI/CD script uses Kotlin DSL, feels "heavy".
- Issue tracker very basic, we end up using YouTrack. Still don't know how to integrate it lol.
- One project can have multiple repos, but they all share same permission. So we end up creating multiple projects e.g. mobile app, web, backend.
- Regarding multiple projects.. we end up creating another project just to contain wiki.
- Cannot trigger based on tag. We end up creating branch for different environment.
- Difficulty in writing CI/CD script due to limited documentation/knowledge on the net and unfriendly keyword ("space"? Lol. You have to type "Jetbrains space automation (keyword here)"
- At certain times VERY slow.
- Notifications in Mobile App sometimes not working.
We find confusing:
- Calendar
- Video call
Confusing because why add more features that's already best served by other services?
Feels like there's a big race to be the all-in-one everything tool for everything. It's Gitlabs whole schtick, GitHub is moving in that direction, now "also Jetbrains".
IMO I think something like Jetbrains should be leaning into integration, not all-in-one. Connective tissue last longer than walled garden.
There's no money in integration. It's very easy to get approval for some big shiny tool with a frontend and 19 different features. It's very difficult to get corporate approval for a tiny integration thing that makes 5 of those features work with some others in a different tool. "Can't you just type it in manually?"
Mainframes were ever since the best option to milk locked-in customers, so the story continues.
The tech is different, the strategy the same: Be the all emphasizing platform so nobody can leave without needing to rebuild substantial parts of their business form the ground up.
Replacing the mainframe after been invested in it constitutes for many a mayor headache to this day. So one can conclude that the said strategy works well since decades.
Apparently it is, for those that haven't had the pleasure to work during those days, which I might add was still quite common around 2005 (when I moved away from HP-UX to Red-Hat Linux at Nokia).
IMO it’s also about choosing the right things to integrate vs. build. I agree that with Space in particular, the choice of what they integrate vs. build does not make sense for maximizing developer experience and value. At Coherence (withcoherence.com // I’m a cofounder) we are also building a more integrated set of tools for building software, but we don’t feel that GitHub and Slack or JIRA/Asana/linear are the tools to bite off, or that the world needs yet another CI syntax and hosting platform. Those are all great places to choose integration with existing popular tools. We do agree with the Space product thesis in that the Cloud IDE is a central piece of the next generation platform - we just think that tying it deeply to the deployment and cloud infrastructure workflows provides the most developer value.
Of course, we’re huge fans of JetBrains products, and them and the other companies mentioned above have so much credibility and such vast resources that they are going to deliver widely-used and powerful products. We hope to integrate with them where it makes sense!
If you are curious to learn about about Coherence, please check out our free beta at the link above or feel free to reach out to hn@withcoherence.com… We appreciate any and all feedback from the HN community.
I'm unsure why the ability to tie the IDEs with the 'space' issue system is not in place. I've gotten very used to using IntelliJ and PHPStorm contexts relating to issues tied to an issue tracker. There's no connector for 'space', and hasn't been for... over a year? If they're wanting to offer all these items and tie you in to an ecosystem... then tie them together. I'm probably in a minority in using it, but it was the first big WTF I saw when trying to start some new projects with 'space', and just gave up for now. If it's not that important to them after a year... it makes me question their priorities (have been a paying IDE customer for... over 10 years at this point).
But hopefully the IDE completion is second to none? My experience with editing .gitlab-ci.yml is that different versions support different features/structures, but GL didn't annotate their file with any such version specifier making it hard on the tooling. I haven't used Space in anger in order to know what that editing experience is like, but I have used the Kotlin version of gradle and it's night and day different having actual, you know, types for things
As much as I detest Jenkins, the one thing I thought it did well with Jenkinsfile was the ability to declare shared modules (GL offers this too with "includes:" but it can be some mindfuck trying to reason about the hierarchy, extends, and now !reference usage to get composition correct). I hope Space has something similar if they're going down that (literal) pipeline-as-code route
That's what I thought initially (it's just code! autocomplete! using Jetbrains' own tools!
But, unless you already know what you're looking for, it's useless. The documentation is very short and lacking examples. So the completion is, well, just for completion. Not good for exploration.
That's incredibly sad to hear; did you open a YouTrack about it? I've had mixed results with their bug triage process, but in my mind if I don't bitch, it's for sure not going to get any attention: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/SPACE
Every CI/CD tool that uses yaml or any other non-programming-language should burn in hell.
Let the developer write the code that creates the datastructure that describes the CICD process. That is flexible, reusable and can even be made typesafe.
I have actually used Spaces on a small side project with some friends up until a few months ago! It does seem to have improved since then, but when I was using it the project management/jira-ish features were pretty weak. Basically just tickets with IDs, that you could assign a status. It worked well for our little project but I wouldn’t be able to use it on a larger project. (Things like ticket relations and sub tasks that aren’t just check lists become pretty important imo to not losing things, vs just having everything be a free floating ticket)
The git host and PR management system is well built, and was by far the highlight of using it. It works really well, and I much preferred their model of PRs being just a message thread under the hood, so notifications show up in one spot and remain open and findable, in comparison to GitHub where I tend to lose PRs that I have already reviewed/interacted with once.
We never used the documents/confluence portion of the app, but it seemed capable at first glance, though if I was asked to pick a space to keep structured docs, I’d probably still use something like notion.
I don't use any Jetbrains product and I have no idea how well-executed this is, but I am pleased to see a relatively smaller company competing against the almost monopoly of Microsoft's VS Code and GitHub.
Err, you're aware that GitLab is MIT and Space is not even pretending to be open, right?
IntelliJ and PyCharm Community are both Apache 2 licensed and are absolutely stellar <https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community> (I mean that they're not crippleware, they're outstanding products that just happen to omit Spring, SQL, and Django support from the Apache 2 versions)
I recently bought the Professional Edition of Pycharm after using it for years. The pro features are nice but nothing I missed. Definitely not Crippleware
I also forgot to include "remote executors" in that list for shops that use docker or similar machine learning setups; I can imagine that's a non-trivial market for PyCharm Pro
vs code could always go this way in the future too. some of their most popular features are closed sourced freeware. they probably would never directly charge but it definitely violates the open source spirit when the guts of your IDE are closed off
Also, the depth of the inspections present in all of the JetBrains products make them absolutely incomparable to any "linter" setup or current LSP implementations. But, relevant to this topic, so too is it some unholy incantations to try and run those same inspections in CI, partially because I think that very concept isn't important to JetBrains and partially because of the indexing required by the JB IDEs that drive everyone starkraving mad as compared to the less intelligent editors that can load a text file in a super big hurry
It's interesting to read this, because from my stats just a few people are using VS Code - most of them use IntelliJ-based IDEs or Vim. I’m a freelancer, so I’ve been working with teammates from many countries, from every continent.
I tried it out a bit, the integrations feel really lacking. For example, the teams section is cool, but it can't sync with GSuite or Rippling (or anyone, for that matter), so I have to maintain essentially two sources of truth. Same with calendar, Space won't sync with anyone else, but it doesn't have the ability to invite external users or add video conferencing details. Pretty much the only functional integration seems to be with Github.
This feels like a "jack of all trades, master of none" kind of situation. I love the premise, but integrations are going to make or break this for me. Admittedly, that's the hardest part to build.
It seems like a daunting task for Space to actually deliver on all it's promises, but Jetbrains has an extremely high amount of credibility with developers. I want to believe in this product, as I want competition against VSCode and Slack.
I can believe that it'll be rough at first, but jetbrains is really good at iteratively improving their products.
that said, I'm not incredibly interested in it. Maybe if I were at a company that just got a series A or something, and was starting to hire quickly, and didn't already have an entrenched environment.
I'll probably make use of their remote environments at some point -- it solves a lot of cross-platform development problems. Still has some rough edges though, based on my 10 minute attempt to use it.
I'm at the point where the only thing I want from them is to be able to use a single ide for multiple languages in the same project. I've brought it up before on HN, and it seems like for at least some of their products you can still use as plugins to intellij. But clion really throws a wrench into that.
That run configuration one I'd guess is only partially true, since the recent ones write them to `.run/foo.xml` versus the old style `.idea/runConfiguration/foo.xml`. I haven't dug into it in order to know if the structure of the IJ xml versus the PyC .xml etc differs, but I'd guess they're a lot more likely to share code than the teams that write the Project persistence
I was curious what the experience was since (as you pointed out) there's no C/C++ plugin to add to IJ but I thought _surely_ CLion would support their JDK bread and butter, but damn if it doesn't
> "*.java files are supported by IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Try IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate"
JetBrains products are the only Java IDE that doesn't support JNI debugging and development, they rather sell two licenses.
Android Studio supports that use case, because Google has gotten so bad feedback from leaving NDK users stranded, that they eventually got an agreement to have Clion plugins as part of Studio.
> they eventually got an agreement to have Clion plugins as part of Studio.
Wow, that sounds huge given that as a paying "all you can eat" user I don't believe that I can even install the CLion plugins. Do you happen to have a link talking about that deal?
I suspect a lot of the success of this will hinge on how friendly it is to tools outside the Jetbrains ecosystem. In particular VSCode. On my team in our little startup doing Rust it's sort of 50/50 CLion vs VSCode. And in many ways we're getting okayish value out of just GitHub + Notion + Google Docs.
I'm a big Jetbrains fanboy and an IntelliJ user since the 3.x days. I hope it works out for them.
It seems they are deprecating their standalone code review tool Upsource in favor of the code review tool that's integrated into Space.
Upsource is nice because it allows opening a review for a set of commits which aren't necessarily continuous. This way, multiple people can work on the same branch at the same time, and open a review for their respective commits afterwards. You don't need to wait for your coworker to have their review approved and their branch merged before you can start building on their work.
As far as I know, the other popular review tools (e.g. Github pull requests) only support reviews for entire branches.
Does anybody know another review tool which allows commit-based reviews as Upsource and Space do?
I’m not familiar with Upsource, but what you describe sounds somewhat like the Gerrit review process. Each commit is reviewed individually, but sending multiple dependent commits for review is supported as well. It is technically possible for a coworker to build on top of your unsubmitted changes (by checking out your commits and adding more on top). However this process gets somewhat painful if the coworker updates their commits, which would require you to do a convoluted rebase.
I played with Upsource back when it was their "static-analysis in the cloud," and it actually was cool, but holy hell it was a beast to get up and running, and (just like Qodana that they're trying now) the static analysis was(is?) indescribably hard to configure correctly to get meaningful results
I've heard great things about Gerrit, but it also seems like one of those "strongly opinionated, mailing-list based" review systems, and trying to lobby for such a thing in the GitHub/GitLab web based world is practically a non-starter in my experience
Gerrit is pretty strongly opinionated, but it is not mailing-list based. Review notifications are sent via email, but otherwise everything needs to be done via the web UI (or other tool using the API).
If you get the an email you can read it from your mail client, retrieve the change from Gerrit over git (git fetch gerrit.example.org refs/changes/45/12345,8 && git checkout FETCH_HEAD), address the review and send back to Gerrit (git push gerrit.example.org HEAD:refs/for/main). Though to mark the review comments you would have to reply to the email or indeed head to the Web UI to mark them resolved.
One can send a review vote and message over ssh which is quite convenient to a point I locally have aliases +1 / +2 to do it directly from the command line instead of heading to the web browser.
All in one solutions always look super nice when they first come out, as they can shortcut to just implement all the best practices that most people do right now and look very clean by omitting all the weird edge cases. But give it a couple of years, and you are stuck with a slow moving monolith. That jetbrains fleet - a year after the announcement - is still in closed beta shows that they aren't really setup to move quickly.
But from a business perspective this seems like a good move. There is no competition for such a complete package? Email seems to be missing though. And even if your software is closed source, what if you want to open source parts of it for exposure and talent acquisition?
> All in one solutions always look super nice when they first come out, as they can shortcut to just implement all the best practices that most people do right now and look very clean by omitting all the weird edge cases. But give it a couple of years, and you are stuck with a slow moving monolith.
I'd say that a lot of the pain comes from needing to integrate with the dozens of different pieces of software that people use for their bespoke work setups.
For example, you might use self-hosted GitLab for code and code reviews, but something like Jenkins for CI/CD - so all of the sudden you need to think about the webhooks and reporting build status back for the web UI. Of course, I've seen people just not do that any only Jenkins being able to show you what's going on with your builds (though at least with e-mails).
Furthermore, you might use something like Redmine or Jira for issue tracking which once again have plugins that you need for GitLab to be able to add links in the UI for actual changes done to the code for some business need. Of course, you could go with not the official plugin but something like Jigit which has its own set of oddities and configuration needs.
But if you can stick within the same ecosystem, such as GitLab and GitLab CI (which I implemented in the company and now the majority of new projects use it, because it seems like the sane choice) and maybe even GitLab with GitLab Issues, or even their new features for managing feature flags (which you might just not have otherwise, or will have XML configuration files) and environments, you'll generally have a pretty positive experience!
Personally, I always welcome new players in this market because competition is good, especially when the offerings can be self hosted (which is sadly not a lot of them).
It looks beautiful in the video demo, I just wonder whether integrations will let it down.
GitHub integrates with any code coverage, code quality, security scanning, or CI solution out there.
Slack similarly integrates with any on-call system, time tracking system, code host...
Sure Jetbrains Space has provided the API, webhooks and SDK, but most teams want to focus on their application itself? It feels a lot "safer" to go with a service that isn't trying to offer everything and then pick and choose. Slack+GitHub+CI of the month+code quality plugin of the month+anything...
I think the hodgepodge, piecemeal nature of software development tooling is both a strength and a downfall. Something like JetBrains Space appeals to me at this point in my career, because I really just want to write the software and have everything else handled by default. I don't want to be gluing together services just to get work done.
It's also appealing to me as a way to align everyone on the same tools. One of the most effective places I ever worked, had unified tooling across the developers, and was also working exclusively in one software framework. That made them an absolute powerhouse, and able to share knowledge and streamline work in a way you can't do in other environments.
Heh. You know who made their fortune providing "everything else handled by default"? Microsoft.
Now that enters a fairly divisive terrain, but needless to say, what you expect from single source of tooling generally does not end up being delivered.
I hear you, and I'm certainly not after Conglomerate Enterprise Tooling. But I think there's room for somewhere between that and makeshift tooling pipelines. Not everyone has to use it, but I'd like to have the option of an integrated software development platform.
Jetbrains pivots towards integrated solutions unfortunately reminds me of the demise of Delphi when Borland moved to "ALM". Hopefully IntelliJ fares better
I cannot tell you the amount of "shut up and take my money" if they'd wire IJ analysis into Space, because while they've been trying to ship Qodana for a while, holy hell it's executed poorly. With Space, how can they _not_ have the expertise to have a checkbox that says "run our inspections upon this code" without having to have a PhD in both CI and IJ
They started to remind me of Borland when they came up with Kotlin and with Google's help, started to see the JVM only as a means to bootsptrap their own Kotlin ecosystem.
I find this shift to paid, online code editors and IDEs very dystopian. The last thing I want to do is rely on a proprietary non-free tool that I need internet to access, can not only gather telemetry about my usage, but also all my code…
At some point people have to decide that privacy and freedom are more important than some level of convenience. For me that line is already crossed.
And that’s exactly how dystopias are created. People give away their privacy feeling like they have nothing to hide, up until the point that they really need it back when it becomes a tool of oppression and espionage, but by then it’s already too late. Corporations love to downplay these risks and make it seem like avoiding their road map to vendor lock in and proprietary, subscription based software is for people wearing tin foil hats.
There are certain areas where using proprietary software is too difficult and improvements are needed. I don’t advocate for a Stallman like approach. All I am saying is there are enough great open source tools out there that you don’t need to pay for a proprietary editor at the very least.
There’s also a bit of hypocrisy at play when you care about making your own projects free and open source, but you don’t want to support the developers building free and open source tools by using their projects.
Too late for… what? What do you think is going to happen? JetBrains are going to lobby for a law preventing local development?
> hypocrisy at play
Wow there’s no hypocrisy. I’ve got no moral obligation to support your open source project just because mine is open source. Hypocrisy is telling people to do something and doing another yourself. Given I haven’t told anyone to do anything, where is the hypocrisy?
You’re the only person telling anyone to do anything.
> JetBrains are going to lobby for a law preventing local development?
You think this is hyperbole, but companies lobby for unfair and anti-consumer, anti-privacy laws all the time.
You live in a world with a weekend and reasonable working conditions because workers banded together and fought against corporations to buy those things for you. Don’t be naive. Corporations do what is best for their bottom line.
> telling anyone to do anything
I am explaining to you why it’s in your own self interest to support free and open source software and think of it as a community rather than a label for a project. Corporations don’t need you to side with them, they have money and lobbyists, advocate for your fellow volunteer devs instead.
This is way off the deep end as a response to a company offering a tool that nobody has to use if they don’t want to.
> I am explaining to you why it’s in your own self interest
That’s for your opinion of my own interests.
JetBrains don’t tell me what I should do, or tell me that I don’t know my own interests, or make moral judgements against me, only people like you do that.
If we, the discerning consumer, could just take and toss the flyer being
thrust into our faces by the picketer outside the Amazon warehouse (or
the free software movement's equivalent), the world and HN would be a
less acrimonious place.
If you’re looking for a vitriol target I’d spend a lot more time looking at VS Code which has basically eaten the lunch of FOSS while dressed as a sheep than a commercial tool which has always been commercial (even if the source is available under a very reasonable license).
Developers have bills to pay and the return to timesharing days seems to be only way to force people to actually pay for the work of others, just like in every other profession.
Indeed, the line has been crossed, free beer is empty.
The only things here that concern a business using the product are price point and if there's an offramp in case it's discontinued. Business are used to paying for tools, have internet connectivity with at least three nines of availability, don't care that a vendor is measuring tool usage, and are satisfied by the contract that says how their code can be used.
Even at an individual level, people were paying for Turbo Pascal in the 80s and 90s.
I've canceled my Jetbrains subscription this year after about 10 years. While Goland is gold, Webstorm was a constant source of issues and annoyances. VS Code is light years ahead in the JS world supporting Vue (Volar), Svelte, Tailwind - to name a few. In Webstorm, essential bugs / missing feature are open for years. Fixing Tailwind support took ages - no idea if it's working properly now.
After switching to VS Code I found that almost everything you get with Jetbrains IDEs is available (often better) as a VS Code extension. The only area where Jetbrain has an edge is their integration with DataGrip, which is brilliant. But then, turned out DataGrip doesn't support the recent SQLite version. The answer from the Jetbrains support was a link to an open source repo that was not maintained anymore (or for a period of time - who knows). That's what I go after paying for 10 years for their ultimate package.
Now I'm a more than happy VS Code user. The only thing I really miss is DataGrip.
Instead of fixing their core products, they're creating new ones like Space. That is of course legitimate. They have all the right in the world trying to make more money. But it won't be my money.
It is very unfortunate that they killed Upsource and the recommend Space as an alternative. It is like recommending a Swiss pocket knife as a replacement for a screwdriver. A screwdriver that is much easier and comfortable to handle.
Being a long-time customer of Jetbrains they didn't even want to offer a license so we could temporarily extend our Upsource license while searching for an alternative. Even not though we offered to pay for it.
Things like the Git hosting provided by this Space thing sounded pretty good for EU-based users, as Jetbrains is a company registered in the Czech Republic.
Unfortunately, their FAQ on privacy states that all of the data will be stored in Amazon AWS, so from the privacy perspective this is no improvement over Github or Gitlab.
I don't think I said Amazon is, or isn't, reading customer data. Nobody knows.
As an EU citizen, I just prefer my data to be handed by an European company inside an European country, as I wouldn't want my data to be in China, handed by Baidu, if I was an American citizen.
Why would the China thing matter? Having the NSA etc have data on me is no good. I am American. I have nothing to do with China. The country will never matter personally to me or my life.
> If the US government wants access to your stuff, all the EU hosting in the world is not going to stop them.
These statements are at odds. The first is true, invalidating the second.
If the NSA wants to read my email because they think I'm involved in a terrorist bombing plot, sure, I'm burned on any provider.
If the FBI wants to read my email for pretty much any reason, they'll have to send a warrant which can be addressed in my local court rather than just go through FISA or the CLOUD Act.
If some podunk Texas DA wants to see if I've visited an abortion doctor in France, if the service provider's in the US there's a decent chance for a warrant. If it's in the EU, go pound sand you fuckers.
What I really want is a workflow for managing change requests (CRs) that is tightly integrated with Github and Jira. ServiceNow is super clunky (you can't even have markdown in the fields to provide some decent formatting) and the copy-pasting of links gets tiring very fast.
I am already using Github and Jira integrated - problem is that a. Jira doesn't provide a change request workflow b. They don't integrate with ServiceNow (which is a major IT service management workflow used for, among many things, change management).
Indeed, the process of how software is developed by a large team is different from how it is done by a small team, which in turn is also different from the workflow followed by an individual developer. The larger the team, the more indispensable the tools integration becomes (speaking as a user of Microsoft Teams/Azure DevOps).
Curious what folks use for "all-in-one" development? I'm increasingly finding that I don't have the time/inclination to learn yet another tool for getting basic work done. I've loved working with AWS copilot, and I want to use something like space - but curious what folks have found.
We were waiting for the on prem version to give it a run. Sadly pricing structure is completely different than other Jetbrains products and tbh - crazy expensive. I hope it isn't beginning of transition to overpriced SaaSes everyone else offers.
On prem is starting at $25/mo/user. This tool includes chat, wiki etc, so you want to bring business people too. Suddenly it's couple grands per month + hosting fees, and you're still hostage, as despite using own servers it will stop working as soon as you miss scheduled payment. Since Spaces integrate half of functionality your company needs - of course you will pay.
Compare that to other Jetbrains products, where you pay similar amount once and you can use it forever and you'll see how huge step back it is.
I'm happy for everyone in this thread, that it's trivial for your organization to budget $100k+ (realistically, for mid-size org it's something like this to fully integrate and then pedal back from solution of this size if suddenly you are out of the money - eg. Atlassian estimates 9 month+ migration for its jira instances), however for me it's still kinda big bet :-)
My bad, I missed you were talking about on prem. Genuine question though (I'm just an average salaried dev), what are the advantages of on prem in this case? It looks like it's just costlier, will require more maintenance work, but the end you're still hostage of that same proprietary software.
Please take a look at other Jetbrains products - you pay for them once and if you decide to not pay anymore you can still use current version indefinitely.
Honestly I really don't understand people that say that's reasonable pricing - all these "coffee a day" subscriptions tend to quickly amount to salary of additional developer and you have no flexibility to cut it without serious issues.
In my experience, no one is forced to use JetBrains, but there are innumerable work setups that mandate Windows and thus a lot of the Microsoft tooling that implies
It's also hard to distinguish from outside of that ecosystem how much Microsoft is pretending to play developer advocate in pursuit of the infamous E.E.E. strategy versus PR damage control versus they really do want to ship good dev tooling. I bring that up because if one is afraid of JetBrains morphing into Microsoft, that question brings up "what is Microsoft's motivation" in order to compare how much JetBrains would, or aims to, have those same motivations.
I'm thrilled out of my mind to pay JetBrains the $whatever/year they ask of me because I unquestionably get that much value out of them. And that's not even counting the amount of benefit I get from being able to fix bugs in IJ Community and PyCharm Community due to them being Open. That leads me to believe JetBrains Browser, JetBrains Office, and JetBrains OS are likely quite a ways off because they have plenty of healthy marketshare as it is
Seems cool, but the demo video is so corporation-y it's comical. When they said "experience synergy and convergence throughout the system" I almost thought it was satire.
We like:
- free git hosting
- free slack-like with sub-thread
- generous CI/CD
- built-in issue tracker
- built-in wiki
- very snappy
- has mobile app
We don't like:
- CI/CD script uses Kotlin DSL, feels "heavy".
- Issue tracker very basic, we end up using YouTrack. Still don't know how to integrate it lol.
- One project can have multiple repos, but they all share same permission. So we end up creating multiple projects e.g. mobile app, web, backend.
- Regarding multiple projects.. we end up creating another project just to contain wiki.
- Cannot trigger based on tag. We end up creating branch for different environment.
- Difficulty in writing CI/CD script due to limited documentation/knowledge on the net and unfriendly keyword ("space"? Lol. You have to type "Jetbrains space automation (keyword here)"
- At certain times VERY slow.
- Notifications in Mobile App sometimes not working.
We find confusing:
- Calendar
- Video call
Confusing because why add more features that's already best served by other services?