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."

Ruby.....

[james_in_denver]

It rocks...... I'm using Ruby at work to parse millions of lines of source code across 4 different systems and link that back to literally hundreds of requirements documents. The end result is stored in a database and made available via "Ruby on Rails" [rubyonrails.org]. It's saved the client literally hundreds of hours of debugging and integration time, and the "documentation"? It never gets out of date... Just run the programs against the source code and document repositories nightly and everything is current.....

And Eclipse? simply the best development IDE available IMHO...... And all of that in only a few thousand lines of code.....

Re:What doesn't Eclipse do?

[Dan Farina]

...Truly the emacs of this generation.

From vi, to emacs, to eclipse (ratios of memory usage in each generation maintained!)

I actually do not like the eclipse editor component as much as emacs. Ideally, I'd want the GUI-esque browsing/completion/etc of eclipse with the emacs editor. (There have been attempts at this, but none of them feel "right")

It's also harder to write ad-hoc extensions to an eclipse plugin, which is one large benefit emacs has over it.

df

RDT rocks.

[WWWWolf]

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 [www.iki.fi].)

Re:Ruby.....

[pivo]

I find it hard to believe that someone with a Perl background is complaining that Ruby has a quirky syntax. I think if you spend a little more time with Ruby you'll find that it has a nice, well thought-out syntax. I think you'll also come to think of Perl as the real quirky language.

Re:trollish comment

[jericho4.0]

Then Rails is Ruby's Video Toaster. Rails is pretty hot, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Re:the best thing about this

[chaves]

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 [codehaus.org], Jython [jython.org] and JRuby [sourceforge.net] are initiatives that recognize that.

Nice Ruby OS X editor: TextMate

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

A pretty neat Ruby code editor on OS X is TextMate [macromates.com]. Some powerful stuff in there if you lie somewhere between the vi/emacs camp and the notepad/bbedit camp...

Re:Ruby.....

[Samus]

I see no problem with embedding code that deals strictly with presentation. I wouldn't advocate putting business logic into a page and in fact would whack someone upside the head if I caught them doing that. In this day and age there is no excuse for it. Even php has templating capability. The real issue is having to learn a second language to do it. I'd rather learn a small api to do presentation than a whole new template language. A loop in an rhtml (rails) file is the same as it is in ruby just as a loop in asp and jsp is the same as their respective languages. Ok java tag libs can go a little too far sometimes but I don't have to use them if I don't want to.

What exactly in Python encourages short code and documentation? I would venture to say that it is more the community that encourages this practice and not the language itself. Indentation is an easy one as long as everyone on your team uses the same indentation scheme. I may look at Kid someday if I ever get the urge to look more deeply at Turbogears. Though I was kind of surprised and a bit disgusted to see in the demo video that to do a redirect the guy had to raise an exception. I don't see how exceptions as flow control can be considered a good practice.