The IDE runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and uses Red Hat’s OpenShift as its back-end Platform as a Service) but can run on any Linux distribution, a spokeswoman said.

First-class developers are very hard to find, which means companies have to hire where they can and then figure out how to facilitate working across time zones and geographies.

“Problems can arise, however, when these distributed developer teams need to work together,” said Ruben Daniels, CEO and founder of the two-year-old company, via email.  ”Cloud9 IDE solves this problem by offering a consistent environment for developers to work together in real-time to solve problems in minutes that would otherwise take days or weeks.”

Given that Cloud9 IDE operates out of offices in Amsterdam and San Francisco, it knows a little something about distributed development.

The IDE can run and debug Node.js  and JavaScript code and run Python, Ruby, and Apache+PHP applications.  It supports both the Git and Mercurial distributed version control systems

Cloud9 IDE competes with offerings like the EXO IDE and IBM’s Orion, now an Eclipse project.