Ruby + NetBeans = Ruby IDE

NetBeans support for Ruby development has been around a pretty long time.

Sun's Java developers have had a non-grudging admiration for Ruby on Rails for years.

They liked it so much, in fact, that Sun bought up the JRuby effort.

The NetBeans 6.x IDE can support JRuby (Ruby running on Java VM) or regular Ruby development.

In the blog post NetBeans + Ruby = true you can see that NetBeans has had some support for Ruby for over a couple of years.

What is really exciting about Ruby support in NetBeans today is not that it simply exists but how much support for Ruby is in NetBeans now. Rails development, Gems - all that stuff that Ruby programmers take for granted but maybe would not expect to see in a Java-hosted IDE.

Nevertheless, it is there. Sun's employees/contributors have gone way beyond just adding a checkmark for the Ruby feature in the NetBeans IDE.

I have not written any Ruby code in several months

I really have not written or looked at any Ruby programs since late last year.

I feel a little uneasy with that because it is such a potent language. I am sure I do not want to get rusty at it, nor stall my on-going growth at using the language.

Any experienced, mature programmer should have Ruby and/or Python - or something like them - on their desktops.

No one programming language does all jobs well. Most programming languages have a set of things they do very well - better than most other languages can.

My gut instincts - call it intuition - tell me that Ruby is going to turn a new page and surge in popularity/mass-awareness next year sometime. I think 2008 is going to be the year that Ruby is recognized as a major hit.

I rather suspect that when that happens, the story will come out that 2006 and 2007 is when a lot of amazing Ruby programs got quietly deployed and took root.

Sun brings forth a new Ruby IDE from NetBeans

Here is a pretty cool screenshot of a new Ruby IDE:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/resource/ruby-editing.png

The post that describes what the picture means - which is just what it looks like it means - is here:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_and_ruby_is_true

Sun is making huge strides in adding Ruby support to NetBeans, in part, because they hired the JRuby (Ruby in Java) developers a few months ago.

The Tor Norby weblog post entitled Welcome JRuby for details.

flexonrails.net

Go over and look at flexonrails.net and you will see that Flex now has a way to work with Ruby On Rails.

Ruby on Rails handles the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) database stuff - and FLEX (Flash) handles the GUI (graphical user interface) stuff.

Interesting idea!

Technorati tags: flex, adobe, weblog, framework, programming, ruby, rubyonrails

Riding Rails: Sun hires the JRuby team

Sun, which is about to launch JDK 1.6 and create a more comfortable working environment for Java / scripting-language hybrid applications/systems, just hired the JRuby team.

Riding Rails: Sun hires the JRuby team

JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java. Same sort of idea as the Jython interpreter, which is an implementation of the Python language that is written in pure Java.

So, it looks like Ruby's stock just went up.

Technorati tags: ruby, jruby, sun, java

RadRails 0.7.1 Released

A new version of the Ruby/Rails IDE, RadRails - which is based on the Eclipse IDE - came out a little less than a week ago.

RadRails 0.7.1 Released :

The latest version of RadRails, the Ruby on Rails IDE, 0.7.1, has been released for Windows, OS X and Linux.

I have not updated in a few months so I cannot say firsthand what this new release is like.

I have been pretty impressed with what has come out so far.

The team working on it is very small, just a couple guys, fresh from school.

They are working at an IBM research center now, in Zurich.

IBM was instrumental in giving Java a leg up into corporate enterprise environments while other companies were sill poo-pooing it.

Then IBM turned around and rolled out the free Eclipse IDE, which has revolutionized the Java programming industry.

Now they are throwing their weight behind an effort to help make the Eclipse IDE capable of not merely supporting Java, C/C++, Python, and a host of other languages - Ruby included. They are building up the Eclipse ability to support RAD of web/database applications using Ruby.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, ruby, programming, eclipse, ide

Download Ruby

Ruby 1.8.5 is out for Linux, MS-Windows, Mac OS X, and in source code form.

Ruby 1.8.5:

The current stable version is 1.8.5.

Ruby version 1.8.4 and Ruby on Rails will come preinstalled on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) when it comes out next year, the site says.

Technorati tags: ruby

Ruby Programming Language

The official Ruby programming language website has been updated with a new look.

Ruby Programming Language:

As you can see the much anticipated redesign is now live. It was over a year ago that it was suggested that a visual identity team be formed for the purpose of redesigning the Ruby Web site.

It looks pretty good. I think they did a good job.

There is an attractive use of color, a nice-looking/handy sidebar, and some navigation tabs.

Technorati tags: ruby

Too busy to Ruby this month

I have not even looked at a Ruby book since the beginning of August.

Here are my predictions for Ruby....

I am strongly convinced that Ruby has taken hold and will spread across the computer field like wildflowers over the course of 2006 and 2007.

In 2008, I predict there will be a SYS-CON magazine for Ruby and a whole bunch of books on how to do important kinds of computer programming in Ruby really quickly.

I doubt that Ruby will be any kind of a speed daemon in the next 2-3 years but it will probably happen by the end of this decade.

I had a little setback with my Rad Rails IDE a couple of months ago. After I got my Mac and it all configured with the latest Ruby and the latest Rails and some really cool gems, Rad Rails ability to update itself broke. Since then there have been several updates. I have not gotten them.

I am resigned to having to download Rad Rails and reinstall it all over again.

Given that I don't have any pressing need for Ruby and I am really busy at the moment, it seems likely I will push that exercise until the Fall.

Right now I have stuff to program in 5 computer languages Monday and none of them start with 'R'. Tomorrow, or next weekend, I need to do some stuff on my Mom's computer. She just bought a new Mac, and received an iPod Nano from me shortly after that. I have been doing a bit of tech support for her - setting things up and getting her acquainted.

Next month, I have the released of Firefox 2.0 to look forward to and celebrate. I want to flex my rusting XSLT skills because that will be really in demand.

I recently had my appreciation for JavaScript stimulated. There were a couple functions in the language I had never used before, and overlooked - and they turned out to be pretty cool.

I am looking at The Browser in a whole new light. Not just as a necessity but as the easiest platform to program for some things.

I already have lots of books on the web (HTML, XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript) but most are from the late 1990s. I recently freshened up my collection. Now it covers 2006 standards quite admirably.

I am really amazed at how quickly web programming libraries and the still-vital web browsers out there have advanced in the past two years.

Even in 2002, I think people were still looking at a lot of things promised for the web that were still just all potential - not realized in products yet. Well, this year, that has all changed. The stuff is here and it runs on all desktops.

Well, so as you can see - I have been pretty busy of late. Instead of things letting up, it looks like I am going to be up to my eyeballs in things to do until November.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Wow, pretty amazing. Apple has decided to include Ruby On Rails with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). The version included will apparently be at least the current version 1.1 - but it might even be Ruby On Rails 1.2.

A pretty excited blog post came out last Monday from Ruby On Rail's author, David.

Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard):

It%u2019s finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X (see %u201CInternet and Web%u201D). Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We%u2019ve been working with Apple for quite a while to make this happen and its great to finally be able to share it with the world. The love for Ruby has definitely spread inside Apple and we%u2019ve been thrilled to see the level of interest they%u2019ve taken to get OS X to be a premiere development and deployment platform for Rails.

I really did not hear much about Ruby until just before Rails came out. Half a decade ago I knew a Java programmer who was about to switch to Ruby programming.

He liked the fact it was an interpreted environment. Having done varying amounts of work in a language similar to MUMPS, VB, Python, Perl, and even a little Tcl - I could understand wanting to do some programming in an interpreted language.

But doing all of it in an interpreted language - I just could not see it at the time.

Interestingly enough, the evolution of both interpreted and compiled languages has sped up dramatically since our conversation.

Both have taken on styles and features that I never really expected them to get. At least not just a few years later.

Java now has generics, similar to the templates feature of C++ - at least in appearance and purpose - though not implementation.

Meanwhile, Python and Ruby grew their functional programming support, suddenly developed powerful object-oriented frameworks for rapid web/database application development, and got onto the radar maps of the industry. That got them a lot of respect.

Running behind the scenes at Yahoo, Google, Blogger, and the Washington Post has escaped most programmer's notice. But I think a lot of programmers have heard about the Django project, which is written in Python - and Ruby on Rails, which of course is written in Ruby.

Apple certainly has. They have included Ruby with their operating system for quite a while now. For several years at least, perhaps since the beginning of OSX - I am not sure if it has been that long however.

I do know that when I flip through a book about Ruby programming, at least four out of five times I am looking at screenshots of a Ruby program that were snapped on a Macintosh running Mac OS X - not some other brand of computer.

Now that Apple is bringing Ruby on Rails to sit at the head of the table alongside honored guest Java, maybe there will be 9 out of 10 Ruby articles sporting Mac screenshots.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, ruby, macosx, apple, programming, software

Improvements to the layout/styling of this blog

A couple of things that were the default way the template for this blog were not working well at all when I included snippets of code or documents.

Fortunately, I fixed that this morning by making some changes. I am gradually making these changes across all by blogs on Blogspot.com.

For one thing, I have added support for decorative dashed-line boxes around code snippets that I include. Normally, I make that a dashed blue line, because that seems to be a convention. Here I use a dashed green line, in keeping with the basic color scheme of this blog and its theme.

I also widened the blog. If you have an old 800x600 display, you are going to have to horizontally scroll a little to the right in order to see the whole sidebar. Sorry, but I want to be able to show source code for either documents or programs - and I needed to widen the body section of the blog by 200 pixels.

Last but not least, I am highlighting the Technorati tags area that is at the end of some of my posts with a nice little three-dimensional inlay effect. I think it looks pretty cool. It kind of indicates that these tags are metadata, not part of the actual content itself.

Hope you like these changes. My goal is to make the blog as readable as I can. I also want to really stretch my CSS skills as much as I can. The line between the disciplines used in programming, publishing, web design, and technical writing is really blurring in this era of the World Wide Web and the technologies it has spawned.

Programmers are having to become more multi-disciplined than ever. Personally, I am not trying to buck that trend.

Technorati Tags: blogging, css

Songs tagged as ruby on Last.fm

Everyone needs music to inspire them.

We Ruby programmers are no different! We are men (and women) - not code monkeys.

Investigate some of the songs with a Ruby theme at Last.fm.

You need culture. You have not heard the last of it.

Take note.

Oh, dear.

I hope I have not opened a Pandora's Box.

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Ruby In Steel.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

I think I also read about a an Iron Ruby project or product out there somewhere that integrates Ruby with .NET. Not too sure though.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Iron Ruby.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

hreview - Microformats

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a ton of books.

I was just reading about the new hReview Microformat and it really caught my interest.

Reviews, to me, are very handy. I use them to choose what products to buy, what software is worth trying out, what movies I want to see or rent.

Also, they can be a handy way to quickly select what books from my own collection I should look at when researching a particular topic. I am pretty good at remembering what is in what book. But a couple of times in the past several years, I have been surprised when a particular technology was thrown in as an example in a book I had not expected to delve into that subject.

I own four Ruby books at this point. I have my eye on one or two more. I have looked at several others at Borders and decided not to buy them. They just did bring add enough new knowledge to me in the case of the latter.

I also picked up a copy of the July 2006 Linux Journal the last time I was at the bookstore. I would like to write a reviews of that when I finish reading it. It is a pretty fascinating issue for someone who is into Ruby programming.

Microformats:

hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.

Technorati tags: hReview, microformats, reviewing, metadata, xml, rss

Mondrian Ruby IDE

There is another Ruby IDE out there. This one is called Mondrian Ruby IDE.

Mondrian is built on top of the SciTE framework, which is designed to support programming-language aware text editors. The Ruby code uses the FOX GUI toolkit.

Mondrian's Ruby-specific editing logic is written in Ruby itself.

The authors admit this does cause it to run slowly when loading a large Ruby programming. But they point out that the process of editing a Ruby program is pretty lag-free, after that initial delay for loading.

They also call attention to the fact it runs identically on MS-Windows and Linux.

A couple interesting wrinkles to this tool:

1. UML designer
2. dynamic object browser

Features like these, just five years ago, would boost the price of a C++ IDE from the below $500 price range to a lofty thousand to two thousand dollar price range.

Programming tools have taken a huge turn for the better in the past decade. A lot of this seems to have sprung forth from two things:

1. Apple's ushering-in of object-oriented and GUI-style programming a quarter of a decade ago, with the Apple Lisa and then the Apple Macintosh
2. Richard M. Stallman's insistence over two decades ago that a lot of important software be written as free, open source software.

If those two things did not change the world of software-for-programmers more dramatically than anything else, I do not know what did.

Here is more info, from its home page:

Mondrian Ruby IDE:

Mondrian is a cross-platform project-manager and editor for the Ruby language. Written in
100% native Ruby using the FOX GUI toolkit, Mondrian has the familiar look and feel of a modern IDE
while remaining dedicated to the uniqueness of the Ruby language and its community.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, software, uml, designing, oop

jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin mini-reviewed by bact

Bact has blogged a screen shot of a pretty nice-looking Ruby plugin for jEdit in operation.

Go take a look at it here:

bact' is a name: jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin

I am pretty impressed with how far jEdit has come. About half a dozen years ago, it was a good text editor with an excellent architecture.

Now it is a massive, highly productive community of developers and plugins: far more than just a project or a piece of software. The power inside and polish on the outside of these plugins is really impressive.

Here is the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit home page.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming

SQL On Rails demo screencast

The SQL On Rails website is kind of a dig on the Ruby On Rails website, and the whole RoR phenomenon.

Poking fun at the numerous Ruby On Rails demo screencast QuickTime movies out there - this site includes its own: SQL On Rails demo screencast.

It is pretty hilarious.

You have to watch a bunch of RoR screencasts in order to get it. But if you have, then you will.

Take it with a grain of salt and try to have a sense of humor about it.

I have activated backlinks for this blog

I have gotten one or two requests to activate backlinks. I did not realize at the time that Blogger/Blogspot added support for banklinks at the time. In fact, I barely knew What backlinks are and how they are used.

I was lucky with this weblog. With my oldest one I had to manually add backlink tags to my blog template. It was not too bad. However I do not really like mucking around in there for a few reasons.

Anyway, it is up and running so if someone wants to link to one of my posts, it is now possible to do so. Likewise, I can link to my own posts too - from other posts in the same or different weblogs.

By the way, I have been reading Blogging - Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone, published by New Riders.

It is about the best book someone could write about the Blogger/Blogspot weblogs. It covers a few other of the popular ones too.

This book covers everything from writing your first blog, to customizing your templates, adding CSS and Javascript, and even making money with your weblog.

I did not see backlinks in the book, which are a pretty new feature. The book is several years old, though. My impression is not a lot of stuff has changed in the past couple years, but the backlink thing is one new addition to those original Blogger features that were there when Google bought it.

Oh, mobile voice blogging is a new feature too. I kind of doubt that is in the book either. The rest of the features seem to get decent coverage.

Technorati Weblog: Introducing Microformats Search and Pingerati

Technorati announced some pretty exciting developments on their weblog just over a week ago, on May 31.

The big news is that they have added support for Microformats. Microformats included metadata about the information contained in a document, or entry in a document, directly into the internals of the document itself.

While obviously, this further mixes content with presentation to a certain degree, it is sort of a special case. The information itself, is generally not so much data as metadata. It describes the content, it is not the content per se. Further, what it really does is provide context about that content.

It is knowledge of that context that Technorati, the popular blog indexing/searching/tagging service, has now been enabled to read and exploit for the benefit of its readers. That in turn, will be a big help to the authors of the blogs it harnesses.

This assumes their goal is to either become popular, which being helpful to a readership certainly does - or if they just want to be able to organize their own writing for their own use.

After all, many weblogs are simply journals in the diary sense, not in the publications sense.

Speaking of context, this is taking place in front of the backdrop of the development of Firefox 2.0. That version, expected out later this year, will introduce a feature called Microsummaries.

Microsummaries will scrape the content and or anything else in the page, including information in Microformats, and display it in a consolidated presentation in the browser. This will save browser users from a lot of hunting around and possibly even math or sorting effort. Other uses will probably arise too.

Technorati Weblog:

This afternoon Technorati introduces a technology preview of microformats search for contacts, events, and reviews. Available now in the Technorati Kitchen, I invite you to come take a look at this first of a kind realtime microformats search engine, see what the team has worked very hard to build for you, and let us know what you think and what you want from microformats search.

If you are (or will be) publishing with microformats in your blog, and you're already pinging Technorati, then you are all set. Our new microformats search will index your microformats.

Technorati tags: microformats, xml, blogging, searching, metadata, technorati

IBM plays XML card in effort to beat Oracle - Builder UK

IBM is putting some muscle behind its SOA philosophy this month.

The company just made an announcement about the new version of DB2, version 9.

It sports better integration with the IBM WebSphere server, which is based on the popular open source web server from Apache. It adds XML support.

And, it introduces close integration of Ruby on Rails.

That sounds reminiscent of the successful efforts by IBM, Oracle, and other companies to add Java integration into their servers, ushering in the golden age of application servers.
ZDNet UK Builder:

Formerly code-named Viper, the XML capabilities will greatly improve the speed of applications that use XML, he said. "There are 68 patents alone in Viper, and it involved 750 developers over five years," Picciano said. "This is something no one else has and will take years to get here."
DB2 9 will also have a storage mechanism, enabling corporations to reduce their hardware storage needs by about 40 percent, he said. The data server will be optimised to run with SAP's packaged applications and have close integration with Ruby on Rails, Picciano said. He predicted the release will lure in Oracle customers and defend IBM from open-source alternatives, which are increasingly viable for corporate customers.

Technorati tags: ibm, db2, sql, soa, rubyonrails, xml, database