• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 8, 2023

Project IDX is an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled browser-based environment to help developers build full-stack web and multiplatform apps. 

The development experience is built on Google Cloud and powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2, the language model that Google uses to bring AI capabilities to all of its products, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Bard. 

Project IDX is designed to make it easier to build, manage and deploy full-stack web and multiplatform applications, with popular frameworks and languages. Project IDX is also built on Code OSS, so it should feel familiar no matter what the developer builds, according to the Google team.

The environment today supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works.

"These days, getting an app from zero to production – especially one that works well across mobile, web, and desktop platforms – can feel like building a Rube Goldberg machine," the Project IDX team wrote in a blog post. "You’ve got to navigate an endless sea of complexity, duct-taping together a tech stack that'll help you bootstrap, compile, test, deploy, and monitor your apps."

The idea is to make the multiplatform app development workflow faster and frictionless. Project IDX starts with a web-based workspace--familiar for coding--but then it moves to the cloud. The team says developers can go from opening a browser to developing an application in seconds, not days, from anywhere and on any machine.

Apps can be optimized across platforms. Project IDX lets developers preview the full-stack, multiplatform apps as users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.

The team also made it easier to get apps into production by integrating Firebase Hosting. This makes it possible to deploy a shareable preview of the web app, or deploy to production with a fast, secure, and global hosting platform, with just a few clicks, according to the team.