Late to the Party: Tag RDT

Aptana Studio 1.0 Released!

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Wow it's been quite a while since I last posted. In the meantime I've been working hard on RDT and RadRails at Aptana and the job has been great. I'm very lucky to have found a way to work on the open source projects I love full-time.

In that vein I'd like to announce that we've released the 1.0 of Aptana. This release is important for a number of reasons. First, we think the product is good-to-go for everyone. Second, we're announcing a Pro version of the IDE. This version is for users who want to support the project so we can keep going, or who want the extra features and perks that come with a license: nightly build access, priority support, IE Javascript Debugger, SFTP/FTPS support and all sorts of other goodies. The support, nightly builds, SVN access also apply to the other components of what we're now calling Aptana Studio: RadRails, iPhone, PHP and AIR. So if you want to be on the bleeding edge of RadRails/RDT development you'll probably want to look into getting a license.

Keep in mind that while we do offer a pro version for those who'd like to support us or the extra stuff, we are still shipping the same codebase (minus the commercial features) as an open source project under GPL. And we plan to remain an open-source company with an open source product. Here's hoping that model will work for us!

Aptana backs RDT, hires me

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:41:00 +0000

I'm proud to announce today that Aptana has hired me to work full-time on RDT, RadRails and integrating that work with their existing Aptana IDE which focuses on CSS, HTML and Javascript.

This announcement means that RDT will now have commercial backing (but will remain open-source and free!) and that you should see RDT and RadRails move forward at a much quicker pace than in the past.

This is also great news for RadRails users and Rails developers in general as integrating the two will give you code completion, outlines, help, debugging and much more across the entire stack - from model to controller to the HTML, ruby code, CSS and Javascript that make up your views.

RadRails dying off?

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:02:00 +0000

Kyle Shank of the RadRails team has mentioned that he and Matt are both working on a web startup. Looks like the priority of RadRails is lower for them - after all, RadRails doesn't make money.

It's a shame that this sort of thing happens, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've been working on RDT for nearly 4 years now and I can definitely say that people just don't pay for free things. You can beg for donations, but you shouldn't expect them. Given the amount of time and effort - and the sheer number of downloads - it just doesn't pay the bills to run an open source project that passively solicits donations. I estimate the per-user donations for RDT to be at about 1.4 cents*. And if we take out the one large donor? .00071 cents per user.

That doesn't quite cut it for rent and food, unless of course you get the entire world to use your product.

I wish Kyle and Matt well and hope that others from the community step forward and help lead the project onward.

Update: Looks like RadRails isn't dying off - it's getting new ownership.

* This estimate assumes we count RadRails users as RDT users, because RadRails contains RDT. It also uses just the raw zip downloads from Sourceforge for both projects. There is a large number of users we are not counting here who have downloaded via Eclipse's update site mechanism, and who use RDT from other distributions available.

JRuby guys hired by Sun, Netbeans Ruby IDE to come?

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:40:00 +0000

Given the news about Sun hiring the JRuby developers, I thought I should chime my two cents in on the ongoing blog discussions.

First, and foremost, congratulations to Thomas and Charles. This is great news for their project and for Ruby in general. It goes a long way to say that the company behind Java is now supporting a project to run Ruby on the JVM. Maybe now I can give presentations on Ruby at my employer and not be chased with pitchforks and tar.

Next, I'd like to address a number of commenters out there. In particular, Cote': Hi there. There's already a project out there to make Eclipse into a Ruby IDE. I's called RDT and I'm one of the lead developers. It's also the set of plugins that those RadRails guys build on top of. Go check it out. Oh, and Tim Bray should too. He makes no mention of it, but maybe that has to do with politics...

Speaking of politics, the underlying tone behind the news is that Sun is looking to create a Ruby IDE in Netbeans. I have to say I'm a bit torn over this. It's great to see a large company want to create a full Ruby IDE and competition leads to better products for the end users, the Ruby community. But can Sun please get over itself and acknowledge Eclipse exists? It seems a bit of a waste of time for them to roll their own IDE rather than support an existing editor like RDT (or FreeRIDE, or whatever). I guess it's a bit too naive of me to think that they'd do something that didn't push their corporate agenda to some extent. Well, I guess I could always ask IBM to throw me some cash...

Tim Bray on Ruby IDEs

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:33:00 +0000

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.

Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:25:40 +0000

I just noticed today that there's a nice new article up on IBM's developerworks entitled Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse. The article gives a nice little overview of using the Ruby Development Tools Plugins within Eclipse and developing Ruby code with them. The article ends by incorrectly stating that the current release is 0.5.0, we've launched 0.6.0 with a significant number of new features. Hopefully this will help drum up some new users and even developers for the plugins!

RadRails 0.2 Released, and RadRails' ancestry

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:22:02 +0000

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.

Ruby Development Tools 0.6.0 is out!

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:45:00 +0000

The long-awaited new version of RDT is now available. For those unfamiliar, RDT is one of the many choices of IDE for Ruby code - Alongside FreeRIDE, The JEdit plugin, RDE, and ArachnoRuby. RDT is an open source Ruby editor built as a "feature" for the Eclipse platform. (A feature is simply a set of plugins which should be installed together and are "branded" as a single release or product.)

This is exciting for me personally because I'm one of RDT's developers (it could be said that I'm the reason why it took so long to get this version out the door. Sorry!). Great big thanks go out to: David Corbin, Markus Barchfeld and Zach Dennis for helping push this release out the door; Thomas Enebo of the JRuby team for his help in getting integrated with JRuby and catching some hard to pin bugs down; and Torsten Uhlmann and Khaled Agram for their work on the new RI/RDoc view.

New Changes

Integration with JRuby: This was what took so long (for me) and was perhaps a bit too ambitious at first. We integrated the JRuby parser into the backend of RDT to generate an in-memory model of the workspace. For now we're just using it for syntax checking and warnings. Later we plan to leverage this for things like code completion.
Code Folding: Of classes, methods, modules
An integrated RI/RDoc view: Interactively view the docs for Ruby Core and any other Ruby libraries that have been parsed by RDoc with the ri output format option.
Generate Rdoc for projects in the workspace: Under the Project menu, you can generate RDoc for a project and it will automatically create the ri output for use in the integrated RI view.
Integration of Task tags like in the JDT: Finally you can sneak in your TODO, FIXME, or XXX's to mark spots in the code where you need to do some more work later. Custom tags, custom priorities, show up in the Tasks view.
Significantly improved parsing (including problem markers and warnings): Thanks to use of the JRuby parser we should be able to handle parsing much more complex Ruby scripts without dying.
Works with Eclipse 3.1: The older version, 0.5.0 was broken on Eclipse 3.1 Milestone builds. RDT 0.6.0 fixes that.
Auto-completion: Auto-completion of open brackets, parentheses and quotes
Better Ruby script and Ruby-related file recognition: We're trying to get better at determing just what is a "Ruby" file (when it doesn't have the rb or rbw extension). We've expanded the files we consider as Ruby scripts or ruby related. (I snuck in a bunch of the Rails script filenames). We've also defaulted to showing all files in our Ruby Resources view.

Other major features

Graphical code outline
Code formatter
Syntax Highlighting
Integrated Test::Unit view/runner
Interactive Debugger
Custom and preset code templates (blocks, loops, class definitions, etc.)
Regular Expression tester/view
Clickable stack traces in console

Please check out the new Documentation, Download the latest release (or use the update site) and send all of the core developers your feedback and patches!

Revived RDT?

cwilliams — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:16:00 +0000

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!