Slashdot Mirror
RAD with Ruby
Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby,
an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you
are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a
professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Windows support is the big thing it needs to match the flexibility of Python+Glade for RAD stuff. I'm using Python+Glade every day at the moment for prototyping and for making up quick little proof-of-concept solutions, but Windows support is neccessary for my employer to take it at all seriously (even tho I do most of my actual development on Linux).
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the Ruby fan myself. However, what the hell kind of story is this? There is little to no real meat to this story, it's just a long winded ad for two Free Software applications! What's to discuss, how great these two things are? Where's the thought provoking stories from the olden days of the site?
That's all the news in there. I really don't understand why the submitter chose to include a whole bunch of Python vs Ruby links. The actual news bit isn't about that at all...
Cooper
--
I don't need a pass to pass this pass
- Groo The Wanderer -
Since I wanted to see what the fuss was about, I recently grabbed the most recent KDevelop and took it for a spin. It's got a ton of really, really cool stuff in there. Integration with valgrind is sweet. The debugger integration is a Good Thing. The reasonably intuitive API documentation access is great. The integration with QT designer is beautiful.
If I were just starting to code, I'd probably use Kdevelop.
However, I found over the course of a couple of painful days that I'm too dependent on some features of emacs to make the switch worthwhile. Quick searching. Tab indentation. Keyboard split buffers. Mouseless cut and paste.
Some of these have equivalents in Kdevelop that would just require relearning a different way to work, which is fine, if somewhat aggravating in my personal case. But some, like tab indentation, don't. So I'm back in good old emacs.
I hear that there may be an effort to embed emacs as one of the source code editor options, in which case I'd definitely switch. I'd probably even switch if there were some reasonable emacs-like bindings in Kate. It looks like a really cool tool generally, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to make a switch sometime in the not too distant future.
Developing web applications is a nightmare, because the knowledge domain is too big and too heterogeneous.
Ruby seems on the right track: the decision of not using thousands of XML configuration files but rather doing everything in code seems like heaven.
"a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application"
All well and good, but if your professional application is proprietary (non-open), you'll need a paid-up Qt licence to go with it.
I discovered Ruby a while back after reading Dave Thomas' "The Pragmatic Programmer". One of his suggestions was to learn a new programming language each year. I psuedo-randomly picked Ruby. It has some interesting and unique features, that have helped me later on with C++ and Java programs.
One of the advantages of learning new languages, even though they may not get used professionally, is the ideas and metaphors that come with the language. Each language was designed to solve a problem, and almost every programming language excels in the problem space for which it was designed. Each also leads to a new way of thinking and approaching a problem (flow, lists, objects, aspects).
By learning from the experiences of others, we can become better programmers and build better programs. We always here why YAPL? or YASL? I say why not? You don't have to use every little language that pops up at work. But, if you learn about the thought processes behind it, you can apply the solutions in other languages.
The article discusses doing RAD in KDevelop. This isn't for enterprise apps but, for getting proof of concepts or prototypes together quickly. I seem to remember a while back an article about doing KDE RAD with JavaScript and DCOM. That was some cool stuff. I played with it and was able to get an app together in a matter of minutes.
Can't we all drop the negative attitudes for a bit and remeber why we got into programming?
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
However, for spelling's sake, you should use plural
No, actually, he's correct. However, for grammar's sake, you should go back to school.
(e.g. "I know, my friend. They've been quite rare, these days.")
How can a language in which functions are not first-class objects be semantically similar to scheme? Semantically Python has much more in common with lisp variants such as scheme than Ruby ever has.
Objects, messages, mix-ins, the mixing in of kernel to the implicit root object, etc. are not elements of scheme. Blocks come from smalltalk, though they enjoy relatively simple representation in scheme, they're in no way the same concept. Iterators (in the ruby sense) don't appear in scheme either.
I generally think of scheme as a predominantly functional language and ruby as an overtly object oriented one. You'd think that this would imply semantic differences, though apparently the parent poster disagrees.