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!