Towards Multi-User Mode in RIDE Web-IDE

RIDE is an integrated development environment for the Reflex language, a process-oriented language designed for developing control algorithms for cyber-physical systems. RIDE was developed based on Eclipse Theia – an open source web IDE framework. Despite being based on web technologies such as Node.JS, RIDE can not serve as a web application for multiple users simultaneously. The paper describes an approach for configuring a server environment and creating a host program that makes hosting RIDE as a public web application possible. It provides problem analysis, tools and frameworks survey, and implementation details. Among discussed technologies are Docker, Kubernetes, and Eclipse Che. For multi-user support and security reasons, an instance of RIDE runs in an independent Docker container for each client. The host program handles input connections, runs and stops Docker containers with RIDE. The described approach may be used for deploying other single-user applications in the cloud turning them into web-services.