From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-04-29T08:35:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE

Hello tsuraan,

>> Isn't the thing that makes code completion difficult the fact that 
>> most Ruby tools don't have a proper notion of a "Project"?  PHP has a
>> similar issue, but in Eclipse I can define a PHP project.  It scans
>> the source and presto completion works and so does a lot of other 
>> great stuff!

t> Not sure what a "project" is in this context, but I think the real 
t> problem is that quite a few ruby libraries are rather dynamic: have a
t> look at soap4r and the recently launched classifier library.  When you
t> use those, the methods that you're using most don't exist until 
t> runtime; especially with soap it would be very difficult to do code
t> completion properly.  I'm also a Ruby newby, so I can't say how common
t> runtime method additions are, but from what I've seen they are rather
t> popular, and they make code completion nearly impossible.

You are right for things like SOAP or any other (distributed) technique
that simply dispatch message names. But we can handle the other case
more or less easily. My example is always TK as this builds a lot of
methods at runtime. In this cases you can simply dump the ruby code image
at the end of a script run and melt the information in this dump
with the data already in the repository. Method addition
is popular, method removal is not popular so it should work.

We are using a different type of language but too many people still
think in static terms. A completition popup can't look the same as in
java/C++ and the data gathering phase can't work with static source
code analysis alone. I'm not a mac guru, but follow apple and

"Think different"


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's