Tim Bray on Ruby IDEs

Tim Bray has been posting an ongoing series of articles documenting his experience in creating a Ruby based Atom protocol exerciser. His inisghts are a nice look from a newcomer to the language and he makes a good case for a number of areas where Ruby is behind the times and behind other prevailing languages.

One such case is in IDEs. I've been aware of this since I began looking at Ruby, and obviously with my work on RDT I've been trying to help out in this regard.

I would encourage Tim and other newcomers to the language to give RDT a serious try. While we're light-years away from the level of functionality found in Java support for Eclipse, we've been making some exciting progress on RDT lately.

In fact, for those who don't mind the bleeding edge, you can download our nightly builds via Eclipse's update mechanism at http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/nightly.

The latest builds now include the work that was completed by Jason in his Google Summer of Code project. So the astute among you should now notice mark occurences support for variables, and even some code completion. We're working to polish those features up and get code completion working under more conditions. Right now, it'll work easily to complete variable names in scope or methods on a declared type. There are some severe limitations as to when the method completion will work for now: it's the first method in the chain on the object and the type is able to be inferred (i.e. declared in scope). To try out the type inferrencing (and show I'm not lying!), you can use a simple example of invoking code completion on code like "1.".

I know, it's a long way from the JDT, but we're getting there. And with a pending patch to JRuby, we'll also be able to integrate the refactoring/code generation work by Mirko and company.

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.