IntelliJ IDEA has provided support for Ruby syntax highlighting since last year, but recently JetBrains, the company behind IntelliJ, advanced its Ruby support with a new Ruby Plugin. An early version recently became available for download.

According to IntelliJ's release notes, the new Ruby Plugin is more than just about support for Ruby the language, and is squarely aimed to assist Rails development. Rails-specific features of the early release include:

• Create and work with Rails projects.
• Rails migrations support inside the Rails project view.
• Show near each Rails action method a small navigation button to navigate to the appropriate view.
• Support for editing files in Rails' default template language.
• The ability to run tests for each test directory.
• Add text snippets for Ruby and Rails.

Other features of the plugin apply generally to Ruby development:

• Type over closing token.
• Browse to symbol (Ctrl+B).
• Run individual Ruby test methods from IDEA.
• Resolve superclass.
• Symbol autoimport.
• Identifier and scope-based symbol resolution.
• Better integration with the installed Ruby interpreter.

IntelliJ is hardly alone in integrating Ruby and Rails support into a popular Java IDE. Tor Norbye has been working on providing Ruby support from within NetBeans (see his screen shots at NetBeans + Ruby = True), and Eclipse-based RadRails has become a serious contender as the Rails development tool of choice that, thanks to its Java roots, works on all platforms.

As high-quality Java development tools start supporting non-Java technologies, such as Rails, would you be more likely to incorporate those technologies into your work?