Unfortunately this project has been aborted. You can still see a limited demo of our work here. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any interest.

A year ago a friend came up with a brilliant idea: making an online IDE, where developpers could write and compile their code from their browser. As first year students, this was a pretty ambitious project. But we realized, when imagining the potential of such a web application, that it’d probably be worth trying. My friend was getting along pretty well with the .NET Framework, and I already had some solid notions of JavaScript, so we put ourselves to the task. After months of hard work, we’ve finally release a first version of our work.

Why should I use it?

The concept of online IDE may looks strange : does anyone really needs a web-based application to program? It’s often useful to have access to your mails or to your calendar when you’re not on a computer of your own (say, at a library/university). But how often do you find yourself in need for a compiler, but unable to use or install Vim or Emacs?

Beginners are one answer to this question. Our website allow anyone to make his first step in the programming world in the easiest way possible: no installation needed, a simple interface, and yet the possibility to experiment with a lot of languages.

Social Programming

But our true potential lays in the fact that we are online. Here are some of the exciting features we are working on to take advantage of this position:

Live Help: we’re planning on implementing a chat in our interface (àla Gmail). It would allow you to communicate with another member of your team or with a public room, to ask questions or organize you work.

Shared Snippets: users will be able to create and share pieces of code, which would then be rated by the community. Anyone (or any member of your team, if you want to keep your snippet private) would then be able to use it at will. The idea in the long term is to generate a complete snippet library, flexible and easily searchable.

CVS Integration: CVS allows you to keep your files up to date even if you’re working in a large team. It will also allow you to use MetaCoding seamlessly: just commit your files and the online copy of your project on our server will be updated.

As a conclusion MetaCoding’s goal is to complement your current editor, giving you access to different kind of tools. You can code under Visual Studio, and open your project on our website if you’re stuck with a bug and need help, for example.

Still in early Beta…

Well, as you would have noticed none of these fancy features is implemented yet. The current version is only a skeleton of what we want MetaCoding to be. So what do we need know? Time and above all, feedbacks. We need to know what you, developers, think about our service and what you’d like to see and not to see.

If you’re interested in this project, you can access this demo to get a glimpse of the interface. To try the compiler, you’ll need to register (it’s quick) in order to create a real project.