CodeGear, a division of Borland Software, is contributing a debugger to the Eclipse Foundation.
CodeGear announced March 3 at the SD West 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., that it funded the development of a new, fast Ruby debugger based on the ruby-debug gem.
A CodeGear spokesman said the company believes that a high-performance debugger is an essential part of every developer’s tool kit, and company leaders wanted to fill this need.
The new debugger includes all of the features developers might expect in a modern debugger, including stepping, run to breakpoint, smart step, variable introspection, hot swap, remote debugging and a free-form expression analyzer, company officials said. This contribution has been underwritten by CodeGear and implemented by xored.com, the company behind the DLTK (Dynamic Languages Toolkit) project. The entire debugger is being contributed to Eclipse.org as part of DLTK, CodeGear officials said.
Read here Darryl Taft’s interview with CodeGear’s CEO.
CodeGear also announced Version 1.1 of its 3rdRail IDE (integrated development environment) for Ruby on Rails. It includes the debugger integrated into 3rdRail with full support for Rails 2.0, Rails refactorings and conversion tools to move applications from Rails 1.x to 2.x.
In addition, the commercial product contains value-add 3rdRail fast debugger features not found in the open-source edition, such as being fully integrated with 3rdRail IDE, as well as support for both Ruby and Rails, embedded Ruby debugging, RHTML or HTML for embedded Ruby, and detailed formatters for Ruby and Rails specific data structures.