Last week, according to a Google+ post from a former Google engineer named Scott Blum, the web giant shut down its Collide project as part of some changes it made in its Atlanta engineering office, but it has given the world at least part of the code behind the tool, launching an open source project on its own Google Code site.
With his post, Blum says that Collide has been under development for about a year. It’s an IDE, or integrated development environment, a tool for building software applications. But unlike traditional IDEs, it runs online, inside a web browser, fostering collaboration among coders and providing access to coding projects from virtually any machine. According to Blum — who left Google when the Atlanta operation was closed — only part of the code behind the tool has been open sourced, but he says this included the meat of the project.