Eclipse Europa (Eclipse 3.3) was recently released this summer. It has a “blessed” Ruby development plug-in that comes in the updates. Look under Help -> Software Updates -> Find Updates -> New Features. Select the Europa Discovery Site and the look for DLTK Ruby.
This editor is completely different than RDT (used in Aptana and elsewhere). Unlike NetBeans, there are no Rails-specific features built-in and there is no support for .erb files. However, the support for basic Ruby code completion and jumping through call stacks is pretty good. Combine that with Eclipse best-of-breed SVN support through Subclipse and it’s a compelling environment to edit Ruby. In the minus column, the debugging support is not as good as NetBeans at the moment.
Here is a video of the Ruby plugin in action.
What they don’t show in the video is that organizing your gems as “Linked Source” is very powerful. It allows you to link into your application the exact version of the gem source of the library you are using for your code. This is powerful as you can jump in and out of library code just as if it where code from your project.
If you are used to running your rails commands from the console like me, then this is a good environment to work in. If you are working on a team of any meaningful size and productivity, NetBeans SVN support is …well… sucks. I am already spending a portion of everyday in Eclipse already for it’s svn-team-synchronize -with-diff-&-commit-sets view anyway. I might as well edit some Ruby while I’m in there and not keep two IDEs open.
Posted on August 22nd, 2007 by dysinger
Filed under: Uncategorized