Hello the_mindstorm,


t> but none of them are at a level comparable with real IDEs
t> (being them IDEs for Java, Python,
t> C/C++/C#, etc). I am wondering why aren't the Ruby community
t> considering this an important aspect?

No they do not. I'm really surprised how hostile some ruby developers
are against IDE's and tool support. Especially some of the well known
oldtimers here in the group. Even when you point them to the benefits
in other IDE's, for example in the smalltalk area you get disgusting
comments. Until now the community is still very dominated by
technical geeks which is not a good thing.

One of the problems with writting an IDE is that it takes an enourmous
amount of time. You must expect 5 years minimum and Ruby is a new
language, at least in the western part of this world.

t> [intermezzo]
t> A few months ago Cedric Beust (http://beust.com) and myself
t> (http://themindstorms.blogspot.com) have
t> launched a new unit-integration testing framework. We had good
t> reviews right from the start, but
t> after launching an Eclipse plugin, the feedback was just 'great'.
t> [/intermezzo]

Same here.

t> use Emacs decently (this is probably only my fault), FreeRIDE
t> is not there for me and only Arachno
t> seems promising to me (not an affiliate of Arachno ;-) -
t> unfortunately commercial product and I
t> don't thing any guy starting with Ruby will jump to buy it,

Right i don't expect this either. Even when i see that the price is
not higher then a usual game and ruby is much more fun in the long
run.

t> 1/ project management
Is done in Aracho.

t> 2/ integrated documentation (API documentation)
Difficult with the current state of Ruby. We still lack a good
documentation standard. RDoc is one step but it misses so much
and is unclear in many others. The huge problem is that there is no
official API to the internal database, even the Seven-Click Installer
installs it wrong - the answer i got aobut this was:
Yes you are right, but it works. Yes it works but it is not good
if you want to build tools and other infrastructure on top of it.
This shows the whole state of the community at the moment and the
resulting problems.

t> 3/ easy source code navigation (like go to declaration, implement this method, etc)
Time consuming, just because you must build a complete repository of
all accessible items. This must be robust and fast to search and the
whole concept does not work well with normal file level editors like
vi and emacs.

t> 4/ autocompletion
Difficult in a dynamic language like ruby. We discussed this to death
in the past. Please use google.

t> 5/ probably many others I don't remember now.
Many many others. And everybody has its own preference, some only want
a debugger but there they want the best one, for others a profiler would
be the most important and there are people who would not accept anything
if it does not look like a Smalltalk image.
And many people are asking about support for rails, they don't have
concrete ideas, they just want to see something for rails. Not easy
for someone like me.


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's