ETA for 1.9.3 support

[amiracam]

, thanks

[Dermot]

I think this is fairly easy. We just need to check it out.

I think we can put it in a bug fix release.

Is this very important for you?

Dermot

[amiracam]

yes, I'm now married to 1.9.3 syntactical diffs in hashes , changes to block closures etc i.e. these things break when i try to flip back, it has been just easier to setup 1.9.3 as the defaultat the shop, I do also work with JRuby which is why I had to go with the added expense of purchasing Rubymine i.e.you all seem to be lagging behind Jruby ,they are now up 1.6.6 . The other reason is that this year I started doing new development work on the Mac and I just could not fathom using RIS  via parrallels , not only due to cost and performance but it seems that I would have to buy a new license of Windows.

Frankly,lately I have been doing more work on Rubymine because I keep going back and forth between my Windows notebook and my Mac mini. I would prefer especially on my Windows tablet to stay on RIS because your debugger is faster,though there's got better. Anyhow, a tangent but I need to figure out a workflow between the two IDEs but again without a 1.9.3 support its a non-starter.

[Dermot]

OK - we'll have a look at 1.9.3 and JRuby 1.6.6. We'll put a post in the forum when we've got some news - hopefully not too long if there are few major changes.

We're seriously looking at supporting Ruby on the Mac (we've got a beautiful 27" iMac sitting here - that is one heck of a screen). I can understand the problems with Parallels + another Windows license.

We'll have full remote debugging in the next major version of RiS and hopefully we'll be able to use the Publish and Deploy features of Visual Studio to push Ruby and Rails code onto the Mac. We've already got Publish and Deploy working in our other product, Amethyst, so it should be straightforward to incorporate this.

I have to say that while the Mac looks beautiful and the user interface is superb, developing on the Mac sucks. It sees that the recommended way of doing serious development is to install a Windows partition and Eclipse and go from there. There has to be a better way.

Dermot

[amiracam]

this all sounds good.

Though I will take exception to that dev on the Mac sucks. I should say actually that I would like to understand better what you mean. Mind you I have been basically doing my dev work on Windows forever and like it just fine. What I like about the Mac though is that its this cross between a very nice personal system and Unix i.e. I can dump into the termiinal when I want and use most everything that's on Linux. Stuff like rvm works etc. I'be been using Rubymine , a combination of the fact that I have an i7 based mini, and perhaps their own optimization's have made it viable though not ideal and again especially working with the debugger. It really used to be a cow

so I'm confused, how will you support Ruby on the Mac ? i.e. isn't your entire proposition based on sitting on top of VS ? and I would certainly appreciate it since it seems my dev life will for the foreseeable future entail bouncing back between the two systems .BTW, you just reminded me I do have a fat client need I need to commit to a decision on platform and as it turns out it seems Flex is a likely choice. So I will post there shortly.

[Huw Collingbourne]

I must admit that I've been doing Ruby and Objective-C development on the Mac recently and I find the development tools a challenge. Xcode in particular is (to be polite) somewhat eccentric.

As for support for Ruby development, our first step will be to ease deployment from Windows to Mac. After that we have some other things in the pipeline but we are not ready to make announcements at the moment. All I can say is that we are increasingly interested in providing better support for Windows developers who either also develop on or deploy to the Mac.

best wishes

Huw

[Dermot]

I've just been looking at the code for the RiS 2.1 release. It does actually support 1.9.3 - I've just tested a simple program and debugged it successfully. There might be some syntax differences between 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 - is there any thing that you know about that doesn't work correctly?

On Mac development, I was referring to Xcode. I have a strong aversion to that thing.

Because Ruby is Ruby (mostly), it doesn't really matter where you write the code, providing you can a) deploy it and b) debug it. So we would still use VS on Windows to write the code, use the VS Publish mechanism to ftp the code to the Mac, and modify the RiS debugger to wait for inbound connection requests from Ruby programs, so that when a Ruby program starts on the Mac, it fires up the VS/RiS debugger. Alternatively, we would use the VS Attach mechanism to 'break into' a running Ruby program on the Mac. Now that requires some work from us to do that, and we're still investigating the best way to do it. We're also looking at MacRuby, which seems quite an interesting product.

We've got a lot of the Attach/Listen debugger code working for Amethyst (we know how to do it and we've done it), so it's not too big a leap to go the final steps for the Mac. It's still early days yet, though.

Dermot

[amiracam]

k, great. When does that come out ? I tried googling a 1.9.2 to 1.9.3 breakdown but could not find anything i.e. for free , Peter Cook has a vid on that. I have a 1.9.3 focused book that mentions throughout the book. In my case when I was flipping back between 1.9.2. and 1.9.3 that thing that bit me was the new hash syntax when using symbols as the key which was a case of me just liking it much better. Its more of a json smalltalk feel e.g. checkout this rspec snippet:

it "should do a new hash thing"  do
    ({name: 'charles', dog: 'kenya'}[:name]).should == 'charles'
  end

i.e. don't have to do the rocket hash , and it also then allows one to write code like this :

analyze data: dataset , from: start_date to: end_date


i.e. where the method #analyze in this case takes one argument hash {data: dataset, from: start_date, to: end_date}

you can also splat the hash at the tail of the argument list.

I see what you mean by Mac support , since I in one dev location have the Mac to use that would still then entails using Parallels i.e. I only have that one dev machine and maybe that's what I need to do if the pay off is big enough.

Finally I have been reading about MacRuby mostly because I hope that it will one day support iOS , in the meanwhile I need to use Xcode.

BTW, I will gladly test Ris 2.1 for you all