From: Richard Dale Date: 2005-01-02T00:56:43+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and Smalltalk like environment?Q Lothar Scholz wrote: > There are two companies working at it at the moment. > There is no open-source project now. > What about FreeRIDE, Eclipse RDT or KDevelop? You may argue that Arachno is the only production ready IDE or whatever, but saying 'There is no open-source project' is misleading in my opinion. And which is the other commercial company, I've only heard about Arachno as a commercial IDE? I'm working on the combination of the QtRuby/Korundum bindings with integrated Qt Designer support (for GUI design) and graphic source code debugger for the KDevelop IDE. It is certainly a complete graphic RAD environment for ruby. The debugger was based on code for a gdb front end, but it also adds a Qt 'Object Inspector' that has capabilities similar to this C++ product: http://doc.trolltech.com/solutions/qtobjectinspector/overview.html I'm mainly going after Qt/KDE programmers wanting a better language than C++ for developing their applications, and who are new to ruby, rather than existing rubyists or smalltalkers, and so the fact the development environment looks like an existing C++ one is a plus. Because I'm working on both the bindings and the development environment I've been able to integrate them to a greater extent than otherwise would be possible. For instance, a variable of type Qt::Color appears as a color in the KDevelop debugger Qt::Object property inspector. You can get the current sources from the kdebindings and kdevelop modules - they should both build against any KDE version from KDE 3.1 to 3.4. I hope to do a new release and put it on the Korundum RubyForge site shortly to make it easier for people to try out. Lothar Scholz wrote: > Ruby is not a image based language. Thats the huge difference. Yes, you're right - that is the key point. I've wondered if it would be possible to design a ruby development environment where the program was 'always running', and you replaced methods using a 'module_eval' call after the IDE did the syntax checking on a newly changed method. Then the IDE would need to keep the ruby sources sync'd as you changed them during runtime. And perhaps keep a version history of changed methods so you could revert and so on. -- Richard