Good Ruby support in IntelliJ 8.0

IntelliJ 8.0 was released yesterday and after installing the Ruby + Rails plugin, IntelliJ is very competitive with the NetBeans for Rails development.

One feature that I particularly like is the jump links in the editor that let you jump from a controller method to the corresponding view template. There are also links from a method to the super class method that is being overridden (if any). There is currently a small bug in the plugin: multiple identical jump links are shown; all work the same.

In some ways it is nice to have Java and Ruby support in one IDE, but there are "Java only" menus shown while working on Rails projects - that is one advantage of the new RubyMine IDE: basically IntelliJ with all Java support removed. At the current time, Rails support for IntelliJ 8.0 seems to be more stable than the prerelease version of RubyMine but it will be interesting to compare the two next year when RubyMine is released as a product.

Comments

  1. AnjanBacchuDev11:55 AM

    2 years for RubyMine ?? Is that a joke ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant12:12 PM

    no joke: I said "it will be interesting to compare the two next year when RubyMine is released as a product". I will compare the two products next year...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown3:12 AM

    Just gave RubyMine a quick testride because of your post.
    Coming from TextMate it feels like switching from a Porsche to a truck.
    Besides the code completion no value is added, IMHO
    For the rare times when I appreciate a bit more visual help I'll stick with Netbeans and it's integrated jruby support.

    Btw: Really enjoyed your article on merb

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark Watson, author and consultant2:25 PM

    Hello Jo,

    RubyMine seems to be improving since the first demo release. Still, to be fair, I will wait until there is a real release before comparing it to NetBeans+Ruby support (which, as you say, is very good).

    I also use TextMate a lot, especially for developing small programs or my own private Ruby gem libraries.

    Thanks for the comment on my Merb article: I had fun writing that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more