Have you ever wanted to discover, run and reuse code from a browser? Well, you might want to take a look at Runnable, which is designed to enable developers to discover, run and instantly implement code for free.
Runnable is essentially crowd-sourcing code to let users discover, test and implement code in their own projects. In that sense, the company is democratizing coding by enabling programmers with basic coding knowledge to build applications quickly, without having to spend time relearning constantly changing languages or searching for and writing code.
Indeed, Runnable, which recently launched, bills itself as a sort of “YouTube of Code.” Similar to the way YouTube took a world of disjointed Internet video and enabled users to easily find specific videos, share and discover new ones, Runnable makes developing software easier by allowing users to find, edit, run, reuse and share code from their browsers. Runnable is adding to the marketplace for APIs and other reusable software.
Yash Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Runnable, said he conceived the idea for Runnable while he was working at Amazon as a software developer. He noticed the company had thousands of internal APIs and software systems. And he said he had to spend days browsing through documentation and wikis to learn and understand what each API did. Unfortunately, this situation is all too familiar to many programmers. Most software projects use hundreds if not thousands of APIs and reusable software modules, and developers would be required to spend days or even weeks reading through documentation, downloading code, setting up test environments and learning each one of those APIs.
“Software is going through its own industrial revolution where developers are reusing code more than writing new code,” Kumar said. “During the industrial revolution, workers would push buttons and pull levers to create products on an assembly line. These assembled products would reuse existing parts and components to create new ones; this is exactly what we’re doing with Runnable, but instead of factory workers, we’re empowering millions and millions of programmers.”
As Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen’s claim that “software is eating the world” becomes a reality, more companies are creating APIs than ever. Indeed, studies have shown that in five years, 85 percent of companies will have at least one API. The explosion of APIs and other reusable software is both a blessing and a curse for developers, Runnable officials said. On one hand, there is tremendous opportunity to create new software, but on the other, developers are constantly required to read through countless pages of documentation, and can’t find the thousands of new APIs that are being developed. Runnable first makes finding the perfect API easy through a simple search and discover process on its Website, and then offers developers an easy way to view, run, edit and copy code that uses these APIs in their projects, the company said.
Runnable provides more than a thousand pages of code and supports all major Web programming languages.
With Runnable, developers can search for specific code, modules and APIs; upload and share code and APIs that they have written; choose between a wide array of languages like PHP, Node.js, Python, JavaScript, ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails; run and edit the code to see if it works with their project; and copy and paste that code directly into their project.
