Google Creative Lab has announced the launch of a new project aimed specifically at the little Raspberry Pi developer board. The product is called Coder and let users easily transform the Raspberry Pi into a basic web server with a web-based development environment. The tool was created by Google's Jason Striegel, Jeff Baxter, and a small team in New York.
Coder is supposed to be a development environment for educators and parents to help teach children "the basics of building for the web." According to the developers, it will only take about 10 minutes to set up Coder. The Google team who developed Coder says that it is a private learning platform for building web programs.
However, Coder is also said to be an inexpensive sandbox development environment for people who already know how to code allowing them to experiment with new ideas. Anyone wanting to give Coder a try can download the Coder Installer onto an SD card. Once that memory card is put into the Raspberry Pi the user can point the browser on the Pi to their coder.local directory.
This should make for cheap web development platform to say the least. The Raspberry Pi sells for $35 alone with accessories for power and Wi-Fi adding a bit more. With Coder being offered for free you can get into developing for the web at around $35.