

Show HN: My startup, Compilr, an online IDE & compiler. Has over 30,000 users - phankinson
http://www.compilr.com/

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famousactress
Random suggestion: I think it would be awesome if your landing page let me
write code.. Knowing how it 'feels' to write (and run!) a Hello World without
registering, etc. would be awesome. Kinda like the MongoDB shell that's on
their website. Love that thing.

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phankinson
This is another great idea. It would be cool to create a sort of paste bin
like ideone.

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axxl
I'm trying to figure out the advantages of this over a regular IDE, etc.
Simply the fact that it's all on the cloud? What problem are you trying to
solve? (I don't mean to sound interrogative, I'm just genuinely curious about
your motivation behind this). It certainly looks neat and will check it out
for myself.

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famousactress
I think there are some interesting upsides.. I already really love
collaborating with GitHub.. the opportunity to take things a step further,
pair-program remotely, or fix a unit test from a computer not running a full
development environment might be pretty cool.

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axxl
That is true. I know someone else brought up integration with version control
systems (Edit: I see from the blog it's something they're working towards).
Furthermore, I'm curious if it allows for offline work on the code as well (if
you're going to be riding a train, and you want to download the latest
version, edit it, and then reupload). Though I guess with the increasing
availability of internet access everywhere this might become less of an issue.

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phankinson
We do have a feature that allows you to Import and Export from the IDE. So
before you get on the train just export and once you have internet access just
import.

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kin
Great site, though things are running a little sluggish for me. The homepage
took a good ~30 second to load for me.

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phankinson
It's running a little slow here too. It might actually be the amount of
traffic hitting our website right now.

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siculars
Google should buy these guys and integrate their stuff into google docs.

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phankinson
That sounds like a good plan. I hope Google is reading this :)

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cameronh90
I think this has a ton of potential. Coding is one of the few things now that
I don't do directly in the cloud, and keeping my various systems' development
environments up to date is something I'd rather not deal with.

Something that'd make this perhaps awesome would be the ability to invite
people to your editing session and collaboratively edit and debug code with
them. My ideal IDE would be one where code is stored in an abstract syntax
tree format internally rather than files, and I could define my rules for how
I like code formatted independently of other people who want to work on my
code. Also, have you looked at the Bespin/Skywriter editor?

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phankinson
Team collaboration is one major feature we are looking into adding. It could
be setup two different ways depending on how the team would like to function.
But essentially everyone could have their own codebase, or there could be one
source code that everyone works from.

I haven't check out Bespin yet, but will do now.

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jam
The design for syntax highlighting is pretty clever, and makes that feature
much more responsive than most in-browser editors. The current line is always
black text on a light blue background... and then when you move the cursor to
a new line, the highlighting is processed.

I've implemented that kind of thing in the past, and making it perform well is
always a ton of work. This approach is much more elegant and gets you 90% of
the value. I like it!

~~~
phankinson
Glad you like it. I'd personally like to add personalizition to the IDE so you
can customize the colors and editor however pleases you.

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phankinson
About 2 years ago, we launched Compilr.com on Reddit. Compilr is an online IDE
and compiler for languages like Java, C#, and VB. Today, we are working hard
on Compilr and are really happy about its recent growth.

In just the last year we have grown the traffic about 400%. The userbase has
grown from 3,000 at the beginning of 2010 to 32,000 users. We expect our
userbase will be well over 100,000 by the end of this year.

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jimboyoungblood
How many of your users are actively using the site?

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phankinson
We'd rather not disclose our specifics at this time.

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jim_h
I was looking through the public projects and think a language filter would be
great. Currently it just shows pages and pages of projects that I'd have to
navigate.

I think it could be a nice and different way to learn new code instead of
using github or other sources to look through code.

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phankinson
That is a great idea. Eventually we'd like to have a keyword search...

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podperson
So far (a) it's super buggy (e.g. clicking on one of "my projects" sent me to
someone else's project of the same name). (b) it's very slow (it took
something like a minute just to get the IDE running). (c) with a PHP project
at least I have no earthly idea how to actually see it running.

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phankinson
This issues may have been from some caching that was enabled. We have since
disabled it. Try clearing your cookies and refresh.

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givan
Is there any way that the code can be run? If I write some php code can I run
it somewhere? This is only a text editor with highlighting? It would be cool
if it had everything related to a project, running, debugging etc not only a
plain editor :(

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phankinson
At the moment PHP, C++ and Ruby can not be compiled or executed. All three
require a substantial backend, but we are working on it.

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srik1234
I can see myself using such a web based IDE. However, I dont know what I'm
buying at compilr. There is no demo of the product. How it works? a video
presentation or screenshot presentation is needed on home page.

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phankinson
You can create an account for free and give it a shot. In the future we will
add a video and a features overview list.

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unohoo
Why is there no FAQ / Help page. I was looking around to figure if the site
helps to run / debug as well. After 10 minutes of searching, i was still not
able to locate this information.

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phankinson
I was hoping to have some video tutorials built beforehand, we have just been
swamped. But there definitely needs to be a help page for users.

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synnik
Does it have source control integration? I've got to believe it does,
otherwise you would not have so many users, but I found no info about it...

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phankinson
Not at this time. This is top priority in 2011.

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bigsassy
Any plans for python support?

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phankinson
Yes, we'd like to add this in the future. We have had a number of requests for
it.

