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Programming Java Open Source Oracle Ruby

Ruby Dropped In Netbeans 7 140


Ruby Dropped In Netbeans 7

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  • Anybody who programs in Ruby/RoR uses either vi or Rubymine.

    • by lsdi (1585395)
      Textmate, aptana, viM. I've seen some heroes using emacs also. Rubymine is just a piece of bloated junk, created by java-minded people.
      • by hedwards (940851)
        Anybody who can get emacs running on a contemporary machine is clearly a hero.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward


          user@host$ sudo $PKG_TOOL $INSTALL_OPTS emacs && emacs

          • by Lanteran (1883836)
            I use slackware you insensitive clod! I'm guessing its a poke at the *ubermassive* memory requirements of *16* MB RAM. To GP, It's OK, you can crawl out from under the rock. The war is over and we all use cat now, as men once did.
    • by Saija (1114681)
      yeah, i was thinking the same, using netbeans to edit ruby is a little overkill
      • using netbeans to edit any scripting language overkill, netbeans just for java :)
    • Seems like most people use TextMate. This sucks, but I have to agree. There are plenty of tools that work well enough with Ruby.

      It does, however, fuel my hatred for Oracle.

      • It does, however, fuel my hatred for Oracle.

        My hatred was already maxed out for the null/empty-string screwup. I fail to see how it could get worse ;)

        • by jdoss (802219)


          It has been so long since I've been bitten by that particular "feature", I forgot about it entirely. Now that I remember: DAMN THEM. GOD DAMN THEM.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Depends on your deployment environment. If your environment is Glassfish with JRuby as your runtime, Netbeans is a wonderful, logical choice as it has one-click deployment to Glassfish instances.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by julioody (867484) on Saturday January 29, 2011 @12:20AM (#35040884) Homepage

      Once again showing that using the demographic you're in as sample leads to bad conclusions more often than not.

    • by mysidia (191772)


      I use Notepad++ and TextMate for RoR coding.

    • I use Kate.
    • by pmontra (738736)
      Exactly. I'm fine as long as emacs doesn't drop support for Ruby :-) I tried to use Netbeans and other IDEs but I never liked all the clutter around the code window. I use them only for Java when the customer forces me to.
    • by kwerle (39371)

      https://github.com/danlucraft/redcar [github.com]

      I'm using redcar. Gotta check out Eclipse and see if they've made much progress.

  • Oracle Software (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nerdfest (867930) on Saturday January 29, 2011 @12:08AM (#35040822)
    I used to like NetBeans at least as much as Eclipse, but with Oracle in charge, I'm not sure I can trust the future of anything from them that's free.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Meh, Eclipse is just...meh.. it'll take awhile for even Oracle's black-thumb to wilt NetBeans until it's worse than Eclipse. Though it's probably a matter of when and not if.

      • No Eclipse, no Netbeans? Ya well, there's IntelliJ Idea which I prefer to both Eclipse and Netbeans. I don't get why people insist on having "one-click" deployment, I thought that's what build tools are for? Maven fits the profile just right :D
        • by akeeneye (1788292)
          I'm equally comfortable with Eclipse and Netbeans. I just discovered that IntelliJ has a free "community edition" now. I've played around with it some and it appears to be pretty decent. It NB starts to suck ass, there are plenty of options. With the Play! web framework (Java, Scala) an IDE is a convenience but far from necessary, as there are no (visible) compilation steps, no builds to be done, just edit, save, reload.
      • by equex (747231)
        I don't see what's wrong with Eclipse, although its best used for Java development. There's other plugins for lots of languages but they seem not to have as many features compared to the 'native Java mode'.

      Oracle's pay-for stuff is also teh suck. Have you ever used Oracle enterprise apps? Cruel and unusual punishment. The only half decent product Oracle makes is a database which has a good reputation for reliability, but PostgreSQL is catching up fast in performance and features, and doesn't cost the extortionate price Oracle asks. With luck, Oracle will soon be in shrink zone just like its evil twin in Redmond, which seems to be trying to emulate.

    • by 1s44c (552956)


      I would not trust them with the non-free stuff either. I have a bunch of Sun servers running Solaris 10. They work great but I'm not counting on ever buying new ones or using Solaris 11 should it ever turn up. Oracle are gutting sun, wrecking everything it was good at. By the time they finish they will realize they have nothing of value left because they destroyed it all. Sun customers now have the choice between expensive pain with oracle or cheap freedom with open source.

    • I've always preferred NetBeans to Eclipse (in the same way that I'd prefer to be beaten with a baseball bat around the knees rather than the head), but those of us who prefer the environment have always been in a minority - the mindshare is with Eclipse and generally if you start to develop in any technology, there's normally an official Eclipse plug-in for it but only some blog posts and half finished third party plug-in projects to support Netbeans development - the exception being most Sun/Oracle Java t

    • I don't know what Oracle's going to do with Netbeans but it's too early to say based on dropping Ruby on Rails support (not, AFAIK, the Ruby language). If Oracle doesn't want to keep every feature under the sun (no pun intended) in Netbeans, then I can't say that's a bad decision on their part. If they start charging for Netbeans and/or intentionally crippling the free version, that will be when it's time to cry foul. I don't count dropping a discretionary feature as RoR support as "crippling".

  • 'However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE. " Remember Netbeans is just Forte - the whole thing is just a collection of modules. Fork the ruby module.
    • almost forgot: http://netbeans.org/community/sources/ [netbeans.org]
    • In other words, Larry wants a new gold-plated toilet for his yacht, so he eliminated a few developer positions to save money. Now he expects people to work on the project for free.

      Who knows? It might work.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Well, considering he's not going to be making any money for the product that he's giving away for free, pardon him for not wanting to spend money to pay people to work on it. Sorry, but it's a business decision and Ruby support doesn't actually make them any money, especially if they're more interested in trying to sell Java-based solutions now that they own that.

        Part of the reason Sun was bought out was because they spent money on utterly pointless crap like adding Ruby support to Netbeans in the first pla

        • by Anonymous Coward
          The /. crowd has a difficult time understanding the dynamics of running a profitable company. For them, open source is the that bullet silver that let others do the work while they don't contribute anything back and show their friends how cool they are by running Ubuntu. Meanwhile, the real world moves on.
  • by rubypossum (693765) on Saturday January 29, 2011 @01:16AM (#35041070)
    I support Eclipse dropping Ruby. It's a waste of time for them to support my favorite language. Eclipse is the peak of the Java wave. Nay, it is the very pinnacle of Gosling's genius. Anyone who looks at the incredible elegance of the system will quickly realize how unsuited it is to Ruby development. Ruby is just not ready for the brilliance of the Eclipse Development System. It was too shoddy, too tainted with the foul fumes of scripting languages. Practically reeks of Perl.

    Until Ruby is worthy we'll just have to settle for Textmate and Vim [akitaonrails.com].
    • s/Eclipse/NetBeans/ ???

    • I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic and I'm just not getting it, but first off as far as scripting languages go Ruby is possibly the cleanest I've ever seen - not to mention the functionality of the language is fantastic without having any of the weird quirks of say ECMA based languages. Eclipse on the other hand is a train wreck. I don't think I've ever gotten eclipse set up "properly" and every time I've used it it has managed to break itself or screw up packages or libraries or something. Honestly I'
      • Netbeans uses Swing which is on Java2D which has been fully hardware accelerated since Java 1.6.0_u10. Netbeans can be a little sluggish when working hard on stuff sometimes but it is certainly a lot faster than it used to be. As you point out Netbeans pretty much works out of the box compared to the morass that is the World of Eclipse plugins. If you haven't tries Netbeans lately it might be worth you checking it out as your opinion might change (and NetBeans 7.0, currently in Beta, has some nifty changes
        • I have no intention of writing any Java code in the near future (and use VIM for everything else), but some of the features built in do look appealing and well done. The integrated versioning for example, I use GIT with Meld and it looks almost exactly like that but all built in. Still, to this day I hate dealing with anything web based in VIM (JavaScript, etc.) and it looks like Eclipse handles all that so I'll give it a try there. Thanks for the heads up.
          • If you haven't given it a go yet then I would suggest researching the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) if you are doing any web stuff. Beats doing JavaScript by hand or most JavaScript libraries. Eclipse (and NetBeans) has a plugin for GWT that is quite nice. If you are doing anything complex it can be quite good to use a full-featured debugger to sort out a web GUI.
            • That actually sounds awesome, and I've got a project coming up that involves Google API's to begin with (maps, calender) so there is no need to hesitate in adding adding the Google Web Toolkit you mentioned. Thanks for filling me in!
      • And I have to seriously question the intelligence of anyone who could not "set up" an IDE that basically works out of the box. You point it to your source, import library dependencies (or better yet have make/ant/BASH script generate the Eclipse project files, they are just XML you know) and off you go. For Java development, it's really good IDE.

        Install VI plugin if you are so inclined and you are doubly better off :D. Netbeans on the other hand has jVi (which is complete VIM port to java and works amazingl
        • Setting up Eclipse itself was always simple. It was getting the plugins to work with eachother or a compatible set of libraries properly installed though Eclipse's disgusting plugin/library manager thing. The only times I used Eclipse it also managed to somehow break itself or all the sudden stop compiling properly or some other random problem that basically lead to reinstalling it being the quickest way to fix the problem. I haven't used it in years now so maybe it is better, but when I did use it it was m
      • From you posting I take it you did not use NetBeans recently. Netbeans has improved a lot. I even think it is better the InteliJ IDEA these days. At the very least NetBeans has the best Maven integration of the three. Just saying because you don't like Ant.

    • by WWWWolf (2428)


      But none of this applies to PHP, which NetBeans continues to support?

      Clearly, you have a very curious view of what constitutes elegance. =)

  • Oracle has nearly nothing to do with Ruby, so in that sense it's not surprising. However it's surprising that only a couple developers complaint about that in the Netbeans testers mailing list [netbeans.org] given the community that had been growing lately around this extension. In other news, Aptana [aptana.org] seems to be a good alternative too.
  • by codepunk (167897)

    I still cannot fathom why anyone would like to spend the day typing the following.


    It gives me pascal flashbacks.

    • by BitHive (578094)

      So do you only write Python or what? Why is '}' easier for your brain to chunk than 'end'?

      • by akeeneye (1788292)
        } Python? Py doesn't use curlies for begin/end. I adore Python and its whitespace goodness, but Scala is really growing on me too. It seems to just intuit the "ends". The dreaded curlies get used about 50% less often than with Java.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I suppose you prefer Python, a language using whitespace for block structures. It's so much fun when someone accidentally uses both tabs and spaces, or decides to move blocks of code around.

      • by lattyware (934246)
        If you are not indenting your code correctly you are still making it hard to read the code. The reality is that whitespace is a good way to show code blocks to humans, and it's good practice to indent properly anyway - so why not just use that rather than indenting and using braces? Braces are just extra stuff that isn't needed.
        • Just try doing it on a 20 year old code base where non-functional changes are prohibited by company policy and lazy programmers have been pasting thousands of lines of functionality from elsewhere into the middle of loops and if statements because they were afraid of impacting old code and where the comments which might have helped you work out what the hell was going on are all written in French and Arabic and most of them are the programmers ragging on each other anyway and everybody uses whatever editor

          • by lattyware (934246)
            Exactly. The code simply can't get to that point with Python. Some people hate having it forced on them, but it simply is a better solution. It's more natural and more sensible. Python tries to encourage a good, or at the very least, consistant, coding style wherever possible.
            • OK, I suppose.

              But the thing with brackets is programmers have a huge set of tools created which are based on brackets. For example, pass over a bracket, and the matching bracket gets highlighted. Jedit even shows you the text of the matching line. Highly useful.

              You can collapse and expand blocks, as well.

              Second gripe: For a language that prides itself of removing superfluous dreck (brackets, semicolons), it's amazing that you have to manually pass along the current object ("self"). Bothersome both for high-

              • by lattyware (934246)
                Well, I use IDEs and editors that support block collapsing with Python - and that can highlight the block of code the cursor resides in. As to passing the current object, it's a simple matter of it makes a lot of sense. Rather than having an extra keyword limiting you, and having to just know it appears out of nowhere, the 'self' way of doing it works very well, and it works consistantly. For example, if you have a class that inherits from another class, and you want to change a function, but simply want to

          With {} (or begin end or ...) my computer can indent it for me. And re-indent it with few key presses if I move it to a place where another indentation is needed. If the indentation is the scoping, the computer cannot do that for me.

          • by lattyware (934246)
            Yeah... Actually, it can. My IDE automatically indents my Python. It's not really hard, it raises it by a level whenever a line ends with a colon. I can reindent blocks easily too... I don't really get your issue.
      • Precisely one of the reasons I hate Python. Not every single piece of code on the planet is going to look good with the same white space structure, sometimes you need to add or subtract whitespace to make your code more understandable. Add that to the fact some editors handle white space completely differently (tab is a character damn you!). But that's not the show stopper for me; for me what really makes me not like Python is things like terrible stability caused by things like poor dynamic variable manage
      • by HiThere (15173)

        Major topic:
        NetBeans always insisted the the Ruby usage was for Rails, so I never found it at all useful.

        Mixing tabs and spaces is a solved problem. Solved quite awhile back. (The code won't compile.)

        As for the other point... that's still a problem. Generally I pull it out and make it a separate function, which is probably usually the right thing to do anyway..

        I *am* still annoyed by Python and white-space, but then I'm annoyed by Go and insisting that opening braces be on the same line as the loo

    • As much as I love Ruby this is one syntax issue that kind of bothers me (along with elsif). The thing is I hate Python using white space/indent levels more than that. As for why Ruby doesn't use braces, it's for dynamic objects and hashes and the like: {:name => "bob", :age => 26} . The thing is you can that in ActionScript3 AND it still uses C like bracing.
    • by Dahamma (304068)

      Sorry, but if you are more worried about using a 3 letter keyword, a bracket, or a bit of whitespace in your coding syntax than actually making it readable and testable - I can't imagine any decent engineers that would want to collaborate with you.

      Now, on the other hand, if you had complained that Ruby has evolved to pretty much accommodate any syntax you can think of (resulting in complete chaos in coding style in many larger-scale Ruby projects) without actually putting much if any time into actual perfor

    • by Peeteriz (821290)

      Well, as the discussion is about decent IDE's, then you can safely assume that none of these users actually type 'end' by themselves, as the syntax structures are autocompleted anyway.

      As long as machine is doing the typing, slightly easier reading is much more important than length of writing.


        First, I don't use autocompletion. I've tried it and found that I can type faster than stopping every time to pick one of a set of options. Autocompletion is for people who can't type, If you can't type very fast you'll never be a very productive programmer.

        Also, "end" isn't easier to read than "}". The closing brace has a distinctive shape, the only place it could be confusing is if it's mixed with parentheses, as often happens in Python, I don't program in Ruby so I don't know if it's the same problem the

  • That you don't have to wait for an 'evil' big company to provide you with features. So stop whining and start coding a community modulebalready. Or is it 'free as in leech'?

    • by bw-sf (937673)
      It's not that I'm a leech, it's just that desktop apps aren't my bag, man. What I hated the least about NetBeans is it allowed me to concentrate on coding my code without telling me I had to write plugins or whatever. I don't want a platform or an SDK or anything; I just want a usable text editor that works nicely with a few different types of code. I don't need something that tries to run all my tests and run my dev servers or anything, I want a lightweight editor. Some syntax highlighting options (plugina
      • You can use Emacs or vi without learning its macro language. Especially if all you need is syntax highlighting and regex search/replace.
        However I cannot think of a reason why it should be bad if you can start make from the editor.


          Me neither.


          generally does the job for me. Also handy is


          Generally from a blank line at the bottom of the file - runs make and drops the output into the vi buffer. You can put /* */ around the line before hand so you don't forget about it and get syntax errors from the compiler output.

          That said, I'm a bit lazy. Usually I just type


          and I don't get the overhead of having s

      • by mangu (126918)

        Kate is exactly what you describe, has been working fine for me for the last ten years or so.

  • It's dropping paid dev support. Instead it will become a community run project like Python.

    From TFA:


    Netbeans is easily extendable through plugins. It's one of the features I like so much about it. The netbeans.org website even has tutorials for how to go about adding new language support through the use of plugins.

    • Have you ever tried adding language support via a community developed plugin? Most of them are way outdated and only run on old versions of the IDE. The ones that do work are mostly terrible and don't provide nearly the level of language support as a default plugin.

  • anyone care enough for netbeans, to save it?

  • The title is so misleading. There is still a Ruby bundle for Netbeans 7.0. In fact you can download the beta now. What happened is they decided to stop paying employees to work on it and are handing it over to the community.
  • There's conflicting information out there:

    They say it's just RoR:

      http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html [netbeans.org]

    They say it's the Ruby language too:

    http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/ruby-dropped-in-netbeans-7 [infoq.com]

    Who's right?

  • Dropping Ruby from a Java IDE doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. It's bloat. The ruby folks can develop a great IDE of their own or use the nightmare that is eclipse or buy Intellij Idea. Ruby on Rails seems like a great prototyping language/framework, but aside from twitter, I can't think of many large scale sites using it.

    I have used netbeans for PHP in the past and it worked better than eclipse, but I still wonder if it should stick to just java. The only reason I used netbeans is because it takes tw

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