Large complicated string, breaks color coding

[Chuck vdL]

Hey again.

So my work took my away from Watir and Ruby stuff for a few months, but now I'm back at it, so I fired up a fresh system and installed the trial of 1.4 and I must say it's working MUCH better with the Watir browser driver stuff these days.

I've got two issues however.

1) a boss obsessed with 'free' being better, and wants me to consider using something called Eclipse.. not sure if you can give me things that RiS can do that it can't, but if you have any comparison of the two tools it might help.

2) when dealing with a HTML reporting class that defines some really long multiline strings, the color-coding stops working and it's like it never see's the closing single quote that ends the string..  so all the rest of the class ends up in one color (dark red?) as if it were part of a quoted string.   The string is pretty long and contains a bunch of HTML code for the page that gets built up eventually by writing these strings out to a file.

The class in question can be found on one of the watir examples pages http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/HTML+report+class (or I can send it to you if you want).  All you need to do to see the problem is copy the code from the wiki page and paste it into a new code file in your project. 

[Huw Collingbourne]

We'll look at the colouring problem in the class you link to shortly.

We haven't got a detailed comparsion with other Ruby IDEs/editors, I'm afraid. In general terms, though, the things that set Ruby In Steel apart are its debugger (not only is it fast but it also has callstack navigation, hover-and-drilldown debugging in the code editor, tracepoints, conditional breakpoints, break on exception, break on hitcount, run macro on break etc. etc.) - in other words, our debugger is the full works, not just break and step! Then there is the Intellisense - apart from its accuracy, it is also fast (compare it with some other systems) and analyses code as it is written (so if variable x is a string then an int then a custom class in different parts of the same code file, the IntelliSense gets it right) and it also lets you create custom Intellisense libraries. Add into the mix our auto-expand snippets (and snippet editor) and the Visual Rails Workbench which is the only full-webpage design environment for Rails views, and your boss should soon see that Ruby In Steel is a lot different from anything you can get for free! 

Here are a few pages of info:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/GUI-Drag-and-Drop-Development-For
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Visual-Ruby-On-Rails-Drag-and-Drop
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-Debugger-Enhancements
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Dynamic-Debugging-In-Ruby
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Debugging-Ruby-with-the-Cylon
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/How-To-Debug-Ruby-Inside-RHTML
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Evaluating-Ruby-IntelliSense
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-In-Steel-Developer-Overview

Oh, and of coures, if you ever want to develop RIA apps, you have the choice of either intergarying with Microsoft's Silverlight or with Adobe's Flex - the rtwo leading RIA technologies - right inside one integrated Visual Studio solution. As you may know we are currently developing a visual development Flex IDE which will integrate with Ruby In Steel. More info here:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Flex-On-Rails-With-Amethyst-and
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Visual-Flex-Design-and-Coding

[Dermot]

Yes, that's a bug. I've entered it into our tracking system and it will be fixed in the next bug fix release.

[Chuck vdL]

Glad to hear you confirmed it, one gets so dependent on the color coding and such, you don't realise how much it's doing for you until it suddenly stops working, and things get much harder..

Any rough ETA on the when a release with the fix for this will be out?

[Huw Collingbourne]

We haven't a date for the next release yet, I'm afraid. This problem has been added to our list of fixes for that release, however. We'll give you more information on the next version here on the forum when a release date is fixed.

best wishes
Huw

[Mark Bixby]

Add me to the list of people eager to see a fix for this problem.  Since I upgraded from RIS 1.3 to 1.4, all of my multi-line strings result in everything from the string down to controller/view file EOF being rendered in dark red.

[Dermot]

OK. Noted!

Dermot

[Patrick Bayford]

1) a boss obsessed with 'free' being better, and wants me to consider using something called Eclipse.. not sure if you can give me things that RiS can do that it can't, but if you have any comparison of the two tools it might help.

I've had some experience with the Eclipse platform - it is primarily aimed at Java developers. It is an acceptable IDE as it stands, and has excellent native Java support. Although usable with other languages/systems such use requires the availability of an Eclipse plug-in for the intended platform - not sure if Ruby is supported.