IntelliJ jumps on Ruby and Rails
Posted by David February 07, 2007 @ 04:19 AM
JetBrains’ IntelliJ has long been the gold standard for Java IDEs. Now the company is taking a shot at turning their suite into a good fit for Ruby and Rails development. This new love is coming in the form of a new official Ruby plug-in.
It features assisted Ruby coding, with keyword completion, syntax highlighting, on-the-fly code validation, error highlighting, and Rails templates and generator integration. They even put together a screencast to show it off.
Cool stuff. Especially if you already plugged down $400 for a license or work on an open-source project (free license, then).
The screencast only shows ruby not rails :(
I’ll rather go with Intype when it reaches beta very soon. It’s TextMate-like.
Worth mentioning another great IDE thats a VS.NET plugin. http://www.sapphiresteel.com/
Killer feature: full support for Rails debugging
I must say I’m not really impressed after watching the screencast. It would be great if it could give syntax warnings on the fly letting me know ‘capitalizee’ isn’t an existing method before I’m manually running my program.
In Intellij company work really smart guys. And I believe that they do really cool Ruby plugin.
Even if plugin would have only 10% of what Java support has in this IDE then IDEA would be the greatest IDE for Ruby and it would be my choice.
Let’s see what will be in IDEA7.
Beside RubyJedit I’ve seen nothing new in the new ruby plugin for Idea. Moreover Jedit (and ruby/rails plugin for it) is free :)
I’m a loyal JetBrains customer (I’ve been using IDEA, and paying for it, since 3.0), but I’ve got to say that the ruby plugin isn’t the least impressive.
Well, I’m spoiled. IDEA is just amazing for Java development, the best of it’s kind, hands down. That’s probably why I expect something a lot better from JetBrains. Let’s hope they keep working on this plugin.
Good idea but its not free IDES :(
I’ve been using RadRails as my IDE for a while now, and have been completely satisfied with it.
Well, I am impressed. Afterall this is just the first version 0.1.1. and it already has nice features. The plug-in is developed as an open souce project, so everybody can participate(at least with ideas and feature requests).
Also for working on open source projects, the licenses for IntelliJ ARE free.
I can’t wait to see version 1.0
D.
Intellij developers promise to bundle Ruby plugin 1.0 with new IDEA 7, that would be released this autumn.
I’ve halfheartedly tried several Ruby IDEs (FreeRIDE, Mondrian, Ruby in Steel, and tons of plain text editors).
Still looking for the perfect one, but for now Eclipse + RDT is just useable enough.
Anyone found an IDE with a few Ruby refactoring features? Dragging a method to another class or something? (I acknowledge that this seems a little harder to implement for Ruby.)
Typical windows crap. The amount of buttons and menus in that window is simple amazing. To each is own I guess, but I have never understood the IDE crutch.
I signed up to the ruby on rails community since the prototype.js developers use Trac.
A day later I started to get spam in my inbox and I’ve just googled my email to see who has given it away. It seems like rubyonrails.org did, as seen by this page: http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:vpEnX4QG1I0J:dev.rubyonrails.org/report/52%3Fformat%3Dtab%26USER%3Danonymous+deletethetrees&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk
I know you have no privacy terms when people sign up but that list of users is pretty ridiculous.
Tried it out and its got mad potential. Can’t wait to see how it turns out in IDEA 7
IDEA is the best Java IDE, without a question.
The big thing about their ruby support is that they plan to offer full fledged Ruby debugging, just as with the java functionality. Not available yet, but they mention it on their roadmap.
re: aa “I have never understood the IDE crutch.”
I work with a couple people that think like you at our java shop. We IntelliJ users code circles around the text editor only coders. It’s quite amusing. With an IDE you can nav faster (ctrl-n + wildcards, ctrl-click on a class to go there, etc), type faster (with all the code completion, and code templates), find bugs faster (IDE hints at obvious bugs), have to look at docs less often (since the IDE shows you all the method/param names), etc.
It’s painful trying to watch the editor only guys code and struggle to do what IntelliJ does for you instantly. They have to compile/test to find out problems they would have known about when they wrote the code if they used an IDE. IntelliJ is possibly the most amazing product I’ve ever used (no I don’t work for them).
I’m very stoked about them supporting Ruby… will be killer when they get the debugger working.
It’s good to see new IDE’s for Ruby/Rails but in the end nothing beats good old Emacs. Nowadays it can even look pretty :)
It is difficult to beat Emacs only in case if you use Emacs.
I tried to start using Emacs several times, but it was very difficult for me. So I have been using plain text editor all the time.
But now I am glad to see that Intellij joined Ruby racing.
re: aa “I have never understood the IDE crutch.”
It depends on the project. You’d be extremely debilitated if you tried doing .net development without an IDE. The obvious rebuttal to that is that ruby is so simple you don’t need an IDE. That’s not really a valid point though. Textmate really is a Rails IDE once you know all the bundles and keyboard shortcuts and everything. If an application helps you write code faster, no matter its VI or Visual Studio or Textmate, its a good thing. The ability to step through code in Visual Studio and inspect every object in real time is awesome. Its also better for learning the language too. With code completion you can see every method available to you and what params they take. Without script/console, doing anything like this in Ruby would be terribly hard.
How can anyone be “completely” satisfied with RadRails? It barely does anything beyond some syntax highlighting, and a window or two on scripts. Nothing that a decent windowing environment, VIM, and a few shell windows (or shell tabs) would not give you. RadRails has a long long way to go.
There no IDEs I am aware of that provide anything like the IntelliJ Java environment for Ruby ot Ruby on Rails period. Certainly not eclipse (gag) which seems to be 3rd string now in Java/J5EE functionality behind netbeans and IntelliJ.
Yes IntelliJ costs money. More power to them!
(Purposely avoiding the Emacs-is-the-one-true-Editor and the It-costs-money arguments)
The guys that developed IntelliJ are incrediblely smart guys. As a Java IDE, it’s the best bar-none, with Eclipse running a close second.
I think a Ruby plugin for IntelliJ rocks, and makes incredible sense. Other than Textmate, it would be a great option for guys stuck in Windows land.
Guys, let’s help IntelliJ and create features requests in their JIRA I.e. we all understand than we want type inference, auto completion, different refactorings, but right now(for current plugin status) it is too complicated tasks, and will be available in future. So we can ask IntelliJ guys to implement any other functionality(for ruby/rails) that will be useful for us or we can suggest which refactorings we expect.
It’s worth noting that NetBeans also has upcoming support for Ruby—See http://scripting.netbeans.org/#Ruby