This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Christopher Williams. Original Post: Tim Bray on Ruby IDEs Feed Title: Late to the Party Feed URL: http://cwilliams.textdriven.com/xml/rss20/feed.xml Feed Description: Ruby. Rails. Stuff. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Christopher Williams Latest Posts From Late to the Party

Tim Bray has been posting an ongoing series of articles documenting his experience in creating a Ruby based Atom protocol exerciser. His inisghts are a nice look from a newcomer to the language and he makes a good case for a number of areas where Ruby is behind the times and behind other prevailing languages.

One such case is in IDEs. I've been aware of this since I began looking at Ruby, and obviously with my work on RDT I've been trying to help out in this regard.

I would encourage Tim and other newcomers to the language to give RDT a serious try. While we're light-years away from the level of functionality found in Java support for Eclipse, we've been making some exciting progress on RDT lately.

In fact, for those who don't mind the bleeding edge, you can download our nightly builds via Eclipse's update mechanism at http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/nightly.

The latest builds now include the work that was completed by Jason in his Google Summer of Code project. So the astute among you should now notice mark occurences support for variables, and even some code completion. We're working to polish those features up and get code completion working under more conditions. Right now, it'll work easily to complete variable names in scope or methods on a declared type. There are some severe limitations as to when the method completion will work for now: it's the first method in the chain on the object and the type is able to be inferred (i.e. declared in scope). To try out the type inferrencing (and show I'm not lying!), you can use a simple example of invoking code completion on code like "1.".

I know, it's a long way from the JDT, but we're getting there. And with a pending patch to JRuby, we'll also be able to integrate the refactoring/code generation work by Mirko and company.