First try at Cloud9, View & Data API boilerplate

By Philippe Leefsma

I discovered Cloud9 last week while working with external developers during our EMEA Cloud Accelerator in Prague, first feeling: impressed!

EMEA Cloud Accelerator is starting in our fancy Prague office! One busy week of work around our cloud APIs ... pic.twitter.com/20XoxmhqAm

— Philippe Leefsma (@F3lipek) September 14, 2015

This is essentially a slick browser based IDE which allows you to easily deploy your project directly on the cloud, so you don't need to worry where you are going to host it - at least for quick prototyping and testing purpose.
When creating new a project - named as workspace - you can use a predefined template or clone an existing repository from github or bitbucket and this is very straightforward.

In order to test that feature, I created a minimalistic boilerplate for the View & Data API project based on node.js : view.and.data-boilerplate

Using that as template in Cloud9, I can literally deploy a viewer webapp on the cloud in couple of minutes, while at the same time being able to tweak it to my will. Hard to beat to be honest!

Here are the steps to get that up-and-running:

1. Sign up for View & Data API keys on our developer portal

2. Once you've got your keys, upload a test model. You can use one of our tool to do that without setup: http://models.autodesk.io

3. Sign up for a Cloud9 account if you haven't done it already, then create a new workspace using my boilerplate as template: 4. Fire "npm install" from Cloud9 command line:


5. In www/js/viewer.js replace the var urn = '...' with the urn of your model from step 2


6. Create environment variables CONSUMERKEY and CONSUMERSECRET using your API keys from step 1


7. Start the Cloud9 project... you've got a running cloud viewer!