What is cloud application development?

One way of describing cloud application development is the ability to create, build, and deploy your software applications from the web browser. You don't need to install anything on your local machine. All you need is a web browser, Internet connection, and the ability to code. The Cloud9 IDE platform is one such example of a web browser-based cloud application development environment. The Cloud9 IDE development platform lets developers write, build, test, and instantly deploy their web apps from the browser. Once deployed, the developer can access the web app using a web URL.

There is another approach albeit a hybrid one to do cloud application development. In this approach, developers write code on their own machine, use locally installed development tools, build their code locally first, and once tested, they deploy those web apps to the platform service on the cloud. The platform as a service on the cloud builds the code again using a supported build tool and deploys the web app to the relevant server. Later, it returns a web URL to the developer to access the web app.