With some basic tutorials under my belt, I decided to see what cloud offered in term of node.js IDE's.

The Cloud 9 node.js IDE was my first stop, and I have to say, unlike Sublime Text with a suite of plugins, it did not leave me wearing, though I admit it's not exactly fair to compare an extensible text editor to a IDE.

While I still have much I want to try, my next investigation was into running node.js locally.

Forever was the first on my radar, which persists a running node script over server and and restarts. Devo.ps blog on their preference of PM2 then caught my attention. PM2 also offers cluster load balancing, JSON configs and few production level features has taken over in popularity.

I then came across a blog post I that, as a node newbie, I found quite useful, 7 tips for a Node.js padawan by Faisal Abid. Its recommendation to use nodemon for dev, and PM2 for production made a lot of sense, especially since PM2 is not design for windows use, time to dust off the LMDE server I usually reserve for Android ROM work.

My next search, being the visual guy I am, I was looking for an all in one local web dashboard, process monitoring, server management & performance monitoring app. This stackoverflow answer, resulted in the context switch I needed from my IIS heavy background to the lightweight node.js space. What I need is not a monitoring app, but a node.js script, or a plugin or two to run on a second port, which monitors the first, as well as Finally, PM2 or whatever else i'd like to keep an eye on.

There also seems to be quite a market for node monitoring apps, such as nodetime and strongops, let alone what the cloud hosting apps themselves offer. Seems as though I am putting the cart before the horse, as I would suspect it best to rule out if an app would use cloud hosting before trying to reinvent the wheel in term of monitoring.

With that small exploratory tangent into the node.js space complete, it's back to Cloud 9 until I get a chance to compare it to Codeenvy, Compilr, Koding, and whatever else enters this rapidly growing space between now and then.