Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> I agree with you that good tools make a world of difference.
>
> My money at the moment is on the FreeRIDE project
> (www.rubyide.org), spearheaded by Curt Hibbs. There
> is already some code (much of it written by Rich Kilmer,
> who codes like the wind) but at present it is even more
> alpha-ware than any of the others, I think.

Actually, Rich has written *all* of the code, so far -- very impressive (and
humbling).

The truth is, that this project *is* in the very early stages, but Rich has
made lots of progress coding the plugin architecture on which *everything*
else will be based, and I just finished laying out a design for the visual
components.

> One nice thing about this project is that it has so many
> programmers that they can't all be lazy at once. As for me,
> I haven't yet contributed a single line of code...

Gee... I'm one of the guys to who started this thing, and I haven't written
a line of code yet either!

I also am impressed with how many developer's have signed up to work on
FreeRIDE, and sometimes I worry that they might lose interest because the
project is not yet in a state where all of them can be doing something
(please, please, don't lose interest -- we're moving as fast as we can!).

But we do have the core plugin architecture coded and working, and there is
now enough design work completed on the visual stuff that we can start
coding an initial set of very basic visual components. Once that is done
(hopefully a couple weeks from now) we will have an initial platform that
will allow all of the FreeRIDE developer's to individually and
simultaneously start working on their respective parts.

I don't want to mislead anyone, we are not going to have a full-blown IDE in
a couple weeks (it'll look more like a brain-dead editor). But we *will*
have a development vehicle that will let the FreeRIDE developer's dig in and
start making some real progress.

If you haven't yet check out the FreeRIDE project, please do
(www.rubyide.org). We've set some pretty lofty goals, but we definitely want
to take an XP approach to the project (release early, release often). And,
of course, we can always use more help -- well... at least in a few weeks we
can!  :-)

Curt