I encountered a fascinating Web site today. The care and love behind its construction are evident. The personal messages from the site’s managers reflect their commitment to exceeding users’ expectations. The idea is novel and the implementation, from what I’ve seen, is first-rate.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that the site fills a need that doesn’t exist, as far as I can tell.

The site is compilr.com. It’s an online IDE and compiler for Python, node.js, PHP, JavaScript, HTML, C, C++, Ruby, Java, C# and VB.NET. Think of it as Google Docs for developers.

compilr.com instantiates a bunch of hot buzzwords. It’s cloud-based. It’s virtual. It’s SaaS. It supports collaboration. All good, right?

Yeah, it’s all good. But I’m left with one question. Who needs it?

If you’re a professional, you want your development environment on your machine, or at least on a local server where you can control the installation. You want to know which patches and revisions have been loaded, and which versions of the libraries are installed. At compilr.com, you don’t know what compiler is running in the back end. If the installed libraries are documented, I can’t find the details. These details matter.

Also lacking are version control and facilities for testing and debugging. Judging from the site’s user forum, these features have been on the back burner for a couple years.

I want to like compilr.com, but I think it’s a solution in search of a problem. It’s easy enough for students and casual developers to download free development environments from the Web. Professionals know where to get their power tools. A Web-based development environment sounds like it ought to be useful, but once you think about it for a few minutes, the usefulness evaporates.

Too bad.

Web recommendation: Here is another alarming article, this one from the good folks at Wired. Little by little, piece by piece, a larger picture is becoming clear, and it’s a disturbing one. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wishes Aaron Sorkin still had a series on the air.

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, has stepped down from his position as gatekeeper of the project. Clearly, the project has grown to a point where the project's creator can finally step back and take a break from working on bug fixes and daily commits. Here's the email he sent to the Node.js developer mailing list:

Now that the rewrite on top of libuv is largely complete, I am ceding my position as gatekeeper to Isaac Schlueter. Our energy will now be largely focused over the next few months on improving the third party module system experience including a website for browsing modules, a new addon build system, and binary installations from npm. Isaac is in the unique position to bridge the gap between core and external modules to ensure a pleasant experience. After three years of working on Node, this frees me up to work on research projects. I am still an employee at Joyent and will advise from the sidelines but I won't be involved in the day-to-day bug fixes. Isaac has final say over what makes it into the releases. Appeals for new features, changes, and bug fixes should now be directed at him.