Two guys named Martin announced a couple of nice little FXRuby-based applications over the weekend.

First, there was Martin DeMello's announcement of the latest version of FXIrb, an irb session embedded in a FOX window. As Martin noted in his announcement, this work builds on some code initially developed by Gilles Filippini (of FXScintilla fame) and later picked up by Marco Frailis.

This was followed up by Martin Ankerl's announcement of fxri, an FXRuby-based viewer for the ri-style documentation. There's a nice screenshot over at Martin's web log. Of special interest is that fxri integrates FXIrb into one of its panes, so that you can try out things on the fly to make sure that they work the way you think they do. Note that fxri depends on the FXRuby gem install and you may find it a challenge to get it working if you've installed FXRuby via the source tarball.

Not to be outdone, Laurent Julliard announced the latest version of FreeRIDE, the Ruby IDE. This version includes an irb plugin based on the previously mentioned FXIrb and Laurent says he's also working on integrating fxri into FreeRIDE for a future release.