Easy Ruby Development with eclipse

RDT is now Aptana radrails, but still provides a powerful IDE for Ruby developers

About three years ago, DeveloperWorks released the "Ruby Development Tools plug-in using Eclipse", which describes some of the things that are available in the Eclipse's Ruby Development tools (RDT) plug-in characteristics, at that time for V0.5. In this article, we'll revisit the tool. Now, RDT is called Aptana radrails and can be used as a plug-in for Aptana Studio or Eclipse. This article describes some of the new features of the plug-in.

The name of the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in and the location of the lookup code have changed, but the basic functions and license terms remain essentially unchanged. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of developing Ruby applications on Eclipse, read the article titled "Using Eclipse's Ruby Development Tools Plug-in," written by Neal Ford, to learn how to create ruby files, how to customize Ruby Editor, how to set up the debugger, run Ruby from Eclipse, and start testing from Eclipse. In this article, we'll build on the article that Ford wrote and look at:

Code folding-You can enable folding for classes and methods.

Outline view-View the outline view in more detail and learn how to use the view.

RI View-Use Ruby's Interactive document utility from the RDT view.

Task tags-create tasks for configurable keywords (such as TODO, Fixme) in Ruby annotations.

The new features in Ruby browser-rdt allow you to easily view and browse all of the Ruby resources available in your project.

Editor improvements-Automatically completes brackets, parentheses, and single/double quotes, as well as better code help features.

Entry

RDT is now known as the Aptana radrails V1.0.3, which can be obtained in aptana.com. To download a new version or update the Eclipse plug-in, follow Aptana's radrails instructions, and Eclipse users should be familiar with these instructions. Note that if you have not previously installed the Aptana plug-in into the Eclipse workspace, you should follow the Aptana instructions for inserting Aptana into an existing eclipse configuration. During installation, you will also need to consult the Aptana Radrails documentation for solutions to OS-specific problems.