Devuntiy, Amy Editor and SubEthaEdit have one thing in common; they all enable your code to be shared with other developers online. Devunity is operating in stealth mode and is not available for a test drive. However one of the interesting and unique features of Devunity is it allows a developer to write code online that can be directly deployed on a PaaS such as Google App Engine besides offering support for API’s such as Flickr, Amazon Web Services etc.

AmyEditor offers an online editor with templates that can be used to auto generate code, for example, generate template code for a Java Unit Test class. A developers’ code can then be saved to a local disk or shared with other developers on an invite only basis.

SubEthaEdit allows you to do real-time collaborative editing of a document or code without locking the changed content for other users. Collaborative editing is done over an encrypted connection (i.e. SSL). However SubethaEdit requires a download of their software limiting its availability to Mac OS.

These simple editors have a potential use in teaching, developing non critical applications in SMB space and may turn into mini IDE’s overtime with all bells and whistles such as debugging features, code refactoring etc. Then they might have a significant impact on how software is developed and delivered. These editors offer a cost effective alternative to on premise licensing model besides enhancing developer productivity through collaboration. Since this industry is in the infant stage, the visibility for such products is limited, which leads to slower product adoption.