Thanks to Roumen, you can see two demos of Ruby support in NetBeans. It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about the subject of Ruby and IDEs, but I’ve spoken with Java people about Ruby and Java frequently.
More importantly are two comments from developers when I asked them what they thought about the screencasts:
From Robert Brook in Twitter: “daily builds still flakey but lighter than eclipse. could use more polish, but pointing the right way.”
Charles “cowboyd” Lowell in #drunkandretired: “certainly looks better that RDT…with ruby support like this, it’s definitely worth me giving the java support another try.”
Both are positive, but Charles’ comments intrigued me the most. For some dumb reason I hadn’t thought of a Ruby IDE as a honey-pot to draw in Java developers who want Ruby support. I’d wager that most developers want one IDE as much as possible. Switching editors is rough going, though, so many people will stick with what they have unless a killer feature comes along.
Stepping away from the implicit project/vendor-sports — and apologies for whoever I’ve left out this time — I’m happy to see more support from everyone for Ruby IDEs and mixing the Ruby and Java worlds. To me, dynamic languages + Java is the way forward.
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