I haven't read the whole forum so this may have been addressed in other areas, but my question is this...
After spending the last month studying Ruby and Rails I was missing my Visual Studio IDE. I attended the Ruby Hoedown in Raleigh, NC and discovered most folks were using Mac notebooks and TextMate. It was like the conference was being held in the middle of an Apple TV ad
Then I found Ruby In Steel a couple of days ago and after installing the trail version I'm coming up to speed on the features. So, on to my question... Do you find most people are happy with the Ruby/Rails IDE's? Or am I just like the masses in that all the good in Ruby was escaping me without a good IDE to help me with my programming?
If you read the Ruby newsgroups on usenet, you will quickly come to the conclusion that hardly any Ruby programmers use or want to use an IDE. The command prompt and a basic text editor is their preferred mix of tools...
Fortunately, people who are moving to Ruby from languages hosted in Visual Studio or from IDEs such as Delphi,
do want a good Ruby IDE. Which is where we come in...
Frankly, even if people are satisfied with the available Ruby IDEs,
we aren't! And that includes Ruby In Steel. While I am of the (somewhat biased) opinion that Ruby in Steel is the best Ruby IDE there is at the moment, it is not the best Ruby IDE that is
possible. I guess you could say that our entire development process is motivated by a sense of dissatisfaction. I don't think we'll ever arrive at the point we we are entirely satisfied with our IDE. There will always be something that can be made better.
What do you see from your prospective? Iron Ruby will certainly use the VS IDE, but IR is some time off in the future. I have real code to write today and can only take so much time looking at a new language and framework before returning to my real work. A side note, no I would not be looking at Ruby if the Rails framework did not exist. Its just to much effort to start from scratch on every project
Regarding Rails. It's certain that Rails has contributed hugely to the increasing interest in Ruby. So far we've provided 'adequate' Rails tools, I think. With the launch of RiS 1.2 we hope to provide the best Rails tools bar none (if we don't, our users will no doubt tell us
). However, it is not the case that all Ruby developers are Rails developers. I know that some other IDEs concentrate on Rails to the detriment of their support of Ruby. As far as we can judge (from feedback), it seems our customers are about 50/50 divided between Rails and non-Rails coders. So a) we won't rest on our laurels after we've released our Visual Rails Edition - we will continue to improve on support for both Ruby and Rails and b) there are some
other important technologies we are thinking about supporting too. When IronRuby gets closer to 'release status' that will be high on our list, but there are also other important Ruby implementations (JRuby, YARV etc.) that we need to consider seriously; and other technolgies too which we may talk about at a later date (when we have something concrete to say).
In short, our aim is to support the dominant technologies used by Ruby developers (currently Ruby 1.8x and Rails) and add support for other technologies which they may find useful to use
with Ruby (that might be C# and VB, as supported by the Ruby Connector which we currently have in beta, or other frameworks if any other significantly compete with Rails, or integration with 3rd part tools and technologies).
One last question... Are you coming to the RubyConf 2007 in Charlotte, NC? I've not been to one and have no idea if there will be a lot of vendors there or if it's mostly technical presentations.
I'm afraid not. We are too busy writing software...
You have a great web site... loved the videos!!!
Thanks. More videos on the way soon...
best wishes
Huw
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