RadRails 0.2 Released, and RadRails' ancestry
I'd noticed the launch and subsequent talk of the new Ruby on Rails IDE, RadRails. The idea intrigued me, especially since I'm one of the lead developers on RDT and we'd heard a number of folks who had wanted to spin off their own Rails IDE separately or on top of RDT. The interest has been piqued yet again by today's anouncement of RadRails 0.2.
RadRails is fairly impressive. It's a nice fully self-contained copy of Eclipse with the relevant plugins installed so all you do is unzip and double-click the executable. It has custom loading graphics, Rails project generation and all sorts of neat little helpers. So where did it come from and how'd they get a full Rails IDE up so fast?
So, I took a peek inside the zip and I was slightly irked by one thing. RadRails is built on top of RDT as well as the Subclipse plugin. You wouldn't know that by their webpage, but they did mention us in the about dialog under the help menu. Not for nothing guys, but if you're building on top of RDT and Subclipse (not to mention Eclipse), it'd be nice to share the attribution and love. RDT could always use the support to drum up usage or more developers which in turn would help your own efforts...
OK, personal rant aside, I do see a lot of improvements that they should consider. First, you have these wizards for generating new controllers or models. But they're hidden. You have to right click in the Rails Navigator, select Other... and then open the Rails folder to find these wizards. They should have nice big clickable icons up top on a menubar. Next, If I enter the name AccountsController in the controller wizard, you should be able to recognize that I typed Controller as a suffix and strip it out of the name before running the generator so I don't get accounts_controller_controller.rb generated. Third, try using the latest RDT 0.6.0 - it looks like you're running an old nightly build under the hood there because Rakefile and the Rails scripts are all not recognized as Ruby files and syntax highlighted, which they ought to be with 0.6.0. Fourth, the RI view we have in RDT? It doesn't look or work too well where you guys have moved it to be default. It should be fairly big like the console view in the bottom left, otherwise you can't read anything. Fifth, there should be shortcuts to show the other views RDT has such as the Test::Unit view or the Regexp view. They're still useful when developing a Rails project.
Revived RDT?
I haven’t spoken at all about this, but I’m one of the core developers on the RDT project which aims to bring Ruby support to Eclipse as a plugin. I wanted to begin learning Ruby a year ago, and decided a good way to do so way to use my knowledge base in Java. I frequently use Eclipse at work and home, so it seemed like it would be a good fit to start with – help out creating an Eclipse plugin written in Java for the Ruby language.
I think I did a pretty good job of jumpstarting the project again when I joined and I’ve put a lot of work into the project. However, I got a little too ambitious after the 0.5.0 release. For 0.6.0, I completely overhauled the core of the model to be much more expansive than previously, and also integrated with the JRuby parser.
The crux of it was that before we had a hand-made parser and only ever cared about the single file opened in the editor. This limited what we could do to a significant degree. In 0.6.0, I wanted to keep the whole hierarchy of ruby projects and their contents in memory so that we could create syntax problem markers, generate warnings, have tasks, and start working towards doing rdoc/ri integration and code-completion.
After a lot of work on it I managed to get most of the core model work and JRuby integration done, but kept running into bugs I couldn’t nail down. My interest in the project waned, and I had other projects competing for my time – so the development of the plugin slowed considerably and the 0.6.0 release never saw the light of day.
But for those of you who do use RDT or would like to there’s some good news: Zach Dennis and David Corbin, along with a number of users who have contributed some patches, have revived the project and are pushing 0.6.0 closer to release. Tomas Enebo has also been a great help from the JRuby team.
If you use RDT or have some working knowledge of Java and/or Eclipse (and don’t mind the cutting edge), please try out the nightly builds and let them know what problems you see, and most of all, thank them for their work.
It’s great to see someone else pick up the ball and run with it. Let’s hope we can get some more developers and users out there to sustain this project. It’s difficult spending so much time on an open-source project with a small (typically 2 active) developer base – but the results can be highly encouraging when you see happy end users, or a big release go out the door. Keep up the good work Zach and David!