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While the Eclipse open-source development community opens its EclipseCon conference, Sun Microsystems and the NetBeans community have announced an early-access release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack, which is a plug-in that provides support for the Ruby programming language.
The NetBeans plug-in offers developers added support for dynamic and scripting languages and includes editing features for both Ruby and JRuby—an implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation will be displaying its own focus on dynamic languages in various sessions at EclipseCon, which runs March 5-8. Sun announced its NetBeans Ruby Pack on the opening day of the Eclipse event.
“Developing these plug-ins for NetBeans is yet another deliverable in our commitment to support dynamic languages,” said Jeet Kaul, vice president for developer products and programs at Sun, in a statement. “NetBeans—with its broad adoption—now extends its reach into a new community of users while exposing the existing Java development community to the power of the Ruby language. Building this synergy is what makes open-source a powerful strategy for aligning and moving the technology industry forward.”
The NetBeans Ruby Pack features code completion for modules, classes, methods and escape codes within literal strings and regular expressions. It also offers extended features such as integrated documentation pop-ups for Ruby API calls, semantic analysis with highlighting of parameters and unused local variables, as well as occurrence highlighting.
Ruby support is available as a download from the NetBeans Autoupdate Center. Additional support for Ruby on Rails is expected to be available midyear 2007.
Meanwhile, Sun plans its fourth annual NetBeans Day for May 7 during the 2007 JavaOne conference. Speakers will include JRuby core developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, as well as Sun engineer Tor Norbye.