From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2002-05-01T04:25:59+09:00
Subject: RE: Why are there four IDE development efforts, and can they be combined?

Every time we see an effort along the lines of a Ruby IDE we try and
welcome them into FreeRIDE.  The FreeRIDE team spent months discussing
lots of issues and capabilities that a great IDE should have and we have
this all online on our Wiki (http://www.rubyide.org).  

I created a core plug-in architecture based on a really cool design that
Curt Hibbs conveyed to me (Ruby'fied of course) and broke this out as a
separate component known as FreeBASE.  The code is available through CVS
on our Savannah web page (http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freeride/).
The plug-in architecture supports visual and non-visual plug-ins.

An initial visual plug-in based IDE environment is coming soon based on
the Scintilla editor component and the FXRuby GUI toolkit.  This is
abstracted quite cleanly in the architecture and can be replaced as
better candidates emerge.

-Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: A Bull in the China Shop of Life
[mailto:feoh@mail.fourfuzzies.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 2:27 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Why are there four IDE development efforts, and can they be
> combined?
> 
> So far I've seen freeRIDE, Practical Ruby, I think one called RubyIDE
and
> another whose name I can't remember.
> 
> The fact that there's this much interest is a GOOD thing, but I'm just
> wondering how these efforts could piggy-back off each others work or
even
> ideally combine <although I know this is hard due to conceptual design
> differences between the projects' founders>
> 
> If nothing else, what about a common architecture for plug-ins?
> 
> For those IDEs that are trying to map to different GUI abstractions,
what
> about a re-usable GUI-agnostic API?
> 
> Just wondering.  I'm not contributing to any of them (I must admit I
am
> only beginning to really learn Ruby.  All my cycles are being eaten by
> Java which I'm in the intermediate stages of learning for work) so
this is
> by NO means a gripe or demand, just wondering what people's thoughts
are.
> 
> -Chris