Codespaces are a feature of GitHub that enables container-based development with VisualStudio Code in a web browser. The container in which vscode runs is configurable, and this repo uses a container with ACE installed.
Individual developers get sixty hours of container runtime for free (at the time of writing), and a codespace can be launched from the "Code" menu:
The container will start up once the image has been downloaded (usually 20-40 seconds) and vscode will start automatically. All of the usual ACE commands are present, servers can be started as usual, etc. For this repo, Maven can be used to build and test the application and library in the terminal window:
mvn --no-transfer-progress -Dinstall.work.directory=/tmp/maven-output/ace-server verify
The first Maven run will download lots of plugins, and subsequent runs will be faster.
The default container does not have the ACE toolkit available (the web console is taken up with vscode and there is no X-Windows display) and so these codespaces are most useful for incremental coding and fixing issues.
For ESQL or Java coding, unit testing, or fixing CI build breaks, codespaces provide an easy-to-start environment that removes the need to install the product locally while still allowing building and testing with the actual product.
Codespaces for this repo use the ace-minimal devcontainer which is built on the standard Ubuntu devcontainer with ACE and Maven installed. The container is pre-built for faster startup, but could also be run as a docker build during codespace startup.
This repo has a "toolkit-xvnc" option for codespaces which will use an ACE devcontainer that can run the toolkit in a browser session; see https://github.com/trevor-dolby-at-ibm-com/ace-vnc-devcontainer for details on how to access the toolkit. This option takes significantly longer to start than the default devcontainer.