From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2001-12-14T06:57:36+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28458] RE:  RDE (was RE:  RAA.succ  (?))

> From: MikkelFJ [mailto:mikkelj-anti-spam@post1.dknet.dk]
> Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 4:26 AM
>
> "Curt Hibbs" <curt@hibbs.com> wrote in message
> news:INEGJNJOFAMNDPNEABNECEILCHAA.curt@hibbs.com...
>
> > supply the plug-ins to support Ruby development. But Eclipse already
> > supports Java, XML, CVS, ANT, and more. By building an IDE on
> the Eclipse
> > framework, we get all this as well.
>
> I've looked at Eclipse. It has a lot of nice concepts. But it's shere size
> and startup time (even with all the deferred load technology) shows that
> Java is and always will be an elephant in a desktop enviroment. It is 36MB
> download without the Java runtime. And its just a framework.

The binary download is about 15MB, 36MB is for the source. Personally, I'm
not too concerned about the size as long as I'm getting something
significant in return. Having used a lot of very good and very poor IDEs, I
can see that Eclipse has definitely drawn on the best of its genre, much in
the same way that Ruby has incorporated some of the best language ideas.

Some people just want a souped-up editor while others want the computer to
facilitate the software development effort as much as possible. Its a
personal choice. It goes without saying that this will result in a larger
program (for this debate I'm purposely ignoring the very real possibilities
of unneeded feature bloat).


>
> I believe a lot of the intelligent design could be taken directly from
> Eclipse, but instead of building on it, the same framework could
> be created
> entirely in Ruby, at lot more leightweight and responsive due to
> Ruby's lack
> of startup time.


I'm less concerned about startup time, than I am about post-startup
responsiveness -- this is what really counts. On this score the Java
implementation of Eclipse probably has an edge over Ruby, (that should
change over time).

I originally planned to do a pure Ruby implementation, and mostly I would
even prefer to do that. But I this is also something that I want to use in
my day-to-day work, and I don't want to wait several years to get there. A
lot of volunteers to help could really push this into an all Ruby project,
hint, hint :-)


> However, their GUI solution SWG is interesting...
> It is worth looking close at SWG as a common GUI frontend for
> Ruby...
> We could more a less port the SWG GUI classes 1-to-1 into Ruby
> even using a
> J2rb tool, now that we have a c++2rb.


SWG is very interesting. However, it would not be as easy as this to port to
Ruby. The C layer of SWG is purposefully designed to be as small as
possible, with as much of the code as possible being written in Java. They
use native widgets where possible, and where there is no sufficiently
functional native widget, they implement their own.

As I said, I'm still open to a pure ruby implementation if there are enough
developers out their who are willing to work on it. The tradeoff is that we
would miss on a significant amount of work being done by other developers,
and we would miss out on having a single integrated environment that can
easily handle projects with mixed technologies (is my bias towards larger
applications showing here?).

Curt