CodeGear released Sept. 17 its new integrated development environment for Ruby on Rails, the open-source framework written in the Ruby programming language and popular with Web developers.
CodeGear, of Scotts Valley, Calif., announced the new product, known as CodeGear 3rdRail, at RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin.
The CodeGear 3rdRail IDE contains several advanced productivity features aimed at making it easier and faster for both new and experienced Rails developers to build database-driven Web applications.
“3rdRail is an intuitive IDE built specifically for Ruby on Rails, with an in-depth grasp of the semantics and conventions of [Ruby on Rails],” said Michael Swindell, CodeGears vice president of products and strategy.
Although Web developers have been attracted to Ruby on Rails and its speed and ease of use in creating rich Web 2.0 applications, users can be slowed by manual processes and practices in developing for the framework, Swindell said.
“CodeGears new 3rdRail IDE represents an important step in tooling for Ruby on Rails,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. “Theyve gone beyond macros and generators and dealt with Rails code on a logical rather than merely textual level. This opens up a whole new world for things like advanced refactorings. And in general provides an environment thats familiar to anyone coming from IDE-heavy environments like .Net or J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition].”
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Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language, upon which Ruby on Rails is based, congratulated CodeGear on the release of 3rdRail. “As the author of Ruby and a developer, I am more than pleased that the CodeGears development tool joins the Ruby developer community,” Matsumoto said in a statement. “As Borland tools helped me a lot when I just began to do programming, it is a great honor to see that a CodeGear tool supports the language that I designed.”
Among the features in CodeGear 3rdRail are Code Navigation and CodeGear Commanders, which provides a quick interface to all of the power of a Ruby on Rails command line for running code generators and performing other tasks, and integrates it into the IDE.
It also supports Intelligent Code Completion, so developers can write programs more accurately and with fewer keystrokes because they no longer need to remember fine points such as object types, methods and method signatures.
In addition, the package supports refactoring and provides a complete run-time environment, productivity wizards and Web development tools, including a Mozilla browser, JavaScript debugging and Document Object Model inspection.
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