Finally, this has changed. After many months of coding, the Arduino IDE supports the ESP8266 module. The Arduino IDE support was announced on the ESP8266 community forum.

Following on from the announcement by Arduino that the new Arduino Create web based IDE is progressing as planned and is now available as hourly builds.

For beginners learning to program Arduinos, a web-based, fully networked developer environment called Codebender could drastically reduce the learning curve.