Ruby is a single inheritance language, but it offers some advanced features that Java technology does not, such as closures (think anonymous inner classes on steroids) and mix-ins. This article introduces using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse, which allows Eclipse to become a first-rate Ruby development environment. Ruby developers who want to learn how to use the rich infrastructure of the Eclipse community to support their language will benefit, as will Java developers who are interested in using Ruby.
you can do all sorts of magic tricks at run time that are very difficult in Java
This should be a real leg up for ruby, a good ide can go a long way for helping language acceptance. Have to wonder know how well this will sell to java programmers, when I have a need for an interpreter to extend my program I reach for ECMA script just for the massive body of work out there who’s size rivals shell itself:
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/index.html
http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/tutorial.html
that and I dislike non-printable character used as syntax.
> that and I dislike non-printable character used as syntax.
Didn’t you mix up Ruby and Python there?
Possibly, doesn’t ruby rely on new lines or carriage returns?
Interesting, I just downloaded RDT about 2 days ago. With the exception of Ocaml Eclipse offers plugins for all my languages and the RDT plugin in particular appears to be a decent IDE for Ruby. What I’d like, not just for Ruby in Eclipse but also for Python is something like >>Do it<< or >>Run it<< in Smalltalk. It would be so cool to just select code in my editor and run it in the console.
The WingIDE (IDE for Python) has something like that (referring to >> Do it <<).
I just use a text editor for my Ruby scripting. Eclipse is such a slow, heavy, all-purpose beast (much like java itself), why encumber ruby with this burden?
Eclipse has damn good code completion; it cuts my typing work in less then half. For another it dose refactoring for you, finding all references and changes them. In other words, it helps you do something similar to Ruby, write less code.
You don’t have much of experience with Ruby if you think that IDE can find all variable or method references for you.
Nope, I new to Ruby. I’m more of a Python person and must say that Ruby on Rails scratches my itch more then PHP + whatever (shudder) or Python + whatever. Ruby is some of the things I liked about Smalltalk (what little experience I’ve made with it) and some of what I like about Python, but for most things not on Rails I still stick with Python. For things I don’t want to use Python or Ruby for I use Java, so Eclipse might just be more natural for me then for you. I look at it this way. I get One IDE for all my languages, written in a language I can actually use. That is powerful to me.
P.S.: That doesn’t mean I stopped using Vim.
🙂
> P.S.: That doesn’t mean I stopped using Vim.
>
Check it out: http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/
If you are a python user and like Rails, check out Django (djangosoftware.com). Like python, it fits your brain (in this case, your web-app brain).
You mean http://www.djangoproject.com/
Eclipse has the best refactoring support I know of, it would be extremely cool if this would also be accessible to Ruby. E.g. rename methods, extract methods, …
I just this week finsihed dumping my windows system for Mandriva 2006.
I am really starting to love Eclipse. Most of my development is C++, Ruby, and Bash scripts. Although, all of my Ruby stuff is small scale and easily done in vim. However if you are doing large amounts of Ruby code this looks like an ideal environment for it.
http://www.radrails.org/
Enjoy!
Yes, I’ve noticed them too, but why aren’t they working with the RDT people?
No support for load path. no way to navigate to types (equivalant of ctrl-shift-T for java or CTRL-N in IntelliJ). This missing feature is huge, one of the greatest IDE features ever.
The code-insight/auto-completion in the IDE is weak. I think it could be much better even given the dynamic typing. No highlighting of errors like unused variables, etc. this is great for finding bugs before you run the code.
I hope that this eclipse plug-in gets more attention, the lack of a good IDE for ruby is a huge negative.
Everyone just forgot about this
http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl
There is also similar tutorial at:
http://www.napcs.com/howto/railsonwindows.html
It’s a very good one too.
RDE (Ruby Development Environment) offer much better code completion.