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Using the Ruby Dev-Tools plug-in for Eclipse
An anonymous reader writes "IBM Developerworks is running an article that introduces using the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) 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."
Really.
I think there is a plug in that should scratch just about any itch. Nice.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Making use of this and the Eclipse RCP, the RadRails is also making a big contribution to the community.
Uses RDT plus others, and a nice, clean install.
... because Ruby is a dynamic language it is more difficult for IDEs to autocomplete, etc.
I do most of my development in Java, so I mostly use IntelliJ (best Java IDE, IMHO). However, I also really like Eclipse because in one IDE you can code in Java, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.
And Eclipse? simply the best development IDE available IMHO...... And all of that in only a few thousand lines of code.....
Here I was, happily writing stuff with XEmacs, but somehow, there was something missing from my coding stuff and things started to feel a bit wooden.
Weirdly enough, when I grabbed RDT, things started to look surprisingly bright and writing code was not that boring anymore. There are some emacsisms that I miss, but otherwise, this thing is really great. Eclipse was clearly made for bigger projects and it worked just fine when I got the crazy tendency to split my code across zillion little files! Wish XEmacs had this good file browser...
(And the silly little Ruby project I've worked on lately was Miller's Quest.)
I know you're just trolling (and being honest about it), but I just got back from the fifth annual Ruby Conference. The attendance at this year's conference was three times what it was at last year's, due in no small part to the success of Rails over the last year. The latest Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, is hovering around the number two spot on Amazon.com's list of popular "Computers & Internet" books. I'm told that they've sold some 20,000 copies of the book since it was published in July. So, apparently, someone cares...
Actually, I think Ruby might just be picking up some steam, thanks to Rails. David Heinemeier Hansson won the "Hacker of the Year" award at OSCON for Rails. Just about every week it seems like I see a new article in this magazine or that one about it. Ruby has surpassed Python in Japan. Who knows?
m.m.
Then Rails is Ruby's Video Toaster. Rails is pretty hot, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The JVM and the J2SE class libraries are the most important contributions made by Sun under the Java technology umbrella. The Java language itself is irrelevant. Many people dislike the language syntax, and they have the right to do so. Syntax is a matter of taste - everybody should be able to program using the language they like the most (for the task at hand). But portability, interoperability, security, and other core features of the Java runtime are often underestimated.
People should stop fighting over language syntax and recognize that what we should be striving for is a feature-rich platform independent runtime, and that is what Java is in its essence. Groovy, Jython and JRuby are initiatives that recognize that.
One cool features in Ecipse's native mode is when you click on a variable it highlights every other instance of that variable within your current source. I haven't seen any other IDE's do this and the PHPEclipse plugin doesn't do it either. Does this plugin for Ruby-on-rails support it?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A pretty neat Ruby code editor on OS X is TextMate. Some powerful stuff in there if you lie somewhere between the vi/emacs camp and the notepad/bbedit camp...
Have you actually tried Ruby? I mean, gave it an honest to goodness chance.. say a dozen or so hours of coding and perhaps the first few chapters of a good reference book? I just find it really hard to believe than anyone who actually knew Ruby's syntax would call it disqusting. It is, by a fairly wide margin, the nicest language I've ever used. Everything is incredibly easy and intuitive. If I don't know how to do something, I can usually guess it on my first or second try, and it makes it so easy to write reusable, modular code that it's stupid not to, even for what appears to be a throwaway program.
Ruby is hugely productive. Pretty much everything I've ever wanted to do requires less code, less configuration, and simply less hassle than in every other language I've used.
Now, this is mostly evident when compairing to more traditional statically typed languages like Java and C#, but Ruby's has plenty to offer folks who already use agile languages like Python or Lisp. Ruby has an easy to use and powerful package managment system, Gems. An excellent build tool, Rake. RDoc, a powerful JavaDoc like documentation system. Rails, which is probably the most productive web devleopment platform on the planet. Watir, a web scripting system that makes functional and system testing a breeze. MouseHole, a really slick scriptable proxy. Two extremely well written, freely available books: the first edition of Programming Ruby, and Why's Poignant Guide. An extremely helpful user community. The list goes on and on.
Maybe you should be asking yourself why you dislike Ruby so much, rather than why everyone else likes it. That's not to say that everyone should like it as much as I do, but I suspect you're missing something important.
I have made it something of a crusade to try out as many languages as possible and not pre-judge their usefulness and capabilities. I have recently been using Ruby very successfully for some small scripting projects. I've found in the process that, although there are some things about it that drive me crazy, for this kind of task (file filters, modeling some data structures with a test script built using RubyUnit, etc.) I like it far more than Perl or Python. As far as I'm concerned, it is the logical successor to Perl. This doesn't mean I think there is no room for improvement in scripting languages, but just that Ruby's advantages already make it so I never want to look at a Perl script again.
What I like about it:
- Being able to leave off unused parentheses and chain together method calls like a_string.chomp.each... allows putting together complex file filters really, really quickly!
- Nice use of iterators in just about every place it makes sense
- Flexible post-statement "if" and "unless"
- Faster than one might expect for a fully interpreted language
- Reasonably good display of syntax errors (better than some)
- Far more consistent syntax than Perl, but makes easy a lot of the same things that Perl makes easy
- Excellent regexp support
- Extensive library
- (Most of the time) "it just works" -- an awful lot of my code ran perfectly on the first try, even though I was a Ruby Nuby.
- "More than one way to do it"
- "Everything is an object"
- Duck typing
- Support for continuations
What I dislike about it:
- Gratuitous spelling of "elsif" (When switching languages a lot, it is really frustrating to have to constantly remember whether I need to use "else if," "elsif," or "elif"
- Syntax doesn't seem to lend itself well to a formal grammar; too much context-sensitivity in parsing
- The last time I looked at the source it was hideous pre-ANSI C implemented with horrifying preprocessor abuses; this may be fixed now.
- The closure syntax is awkward and seems limiting to writing in a truly functional style - I want to be able to pass functions around like any other object, make functions that receive multiple functions as parameters, etc., without extensive additional syntax. (Caveat: I am still learning Ruby's peculiarities, so some of this may be doable, and my difficulties may stem from surface syntax issues and the confusion over the ways it is different it is from, say, Scheme, Dylan, NewtonScript, Self, etc.)
- Conventions for spelling variable scopes such as globals are enforced rather than just conventions
- Not quite multi-paradigm enough for my taste (why can't I work with plain functions, for example, instead of everything's-a-method?)
- Support for methods on singletons didn't do what I expected (but maybe I misunderstood)
- No compilation to machine code or C
- Duck typing doesn't seem consistently applied in the libraries
Anyway... I am a big defender of the principle that one should know many programming languages and use the one best suited to a particular task. I also not truly an experienced Ruby programmer yet, but so far my experience has been pleasant enough that it makes me want to use it wherever it is appropriate.