Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans
wiki.netbeans.org
wiki.netbeans.org
http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal
Complaining about Oracle, or any profit driven company, won't help. Growing open source communities will:
They are doing an excellent job of pissing off all of the people who make the purchasing decisions for Oracle products. This isn't the best idea.
RoR support is just dropped due to various constraints and the community is actually encouraged to intervene:
>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.
I'm curious if people will pick up RoR support or just continue complaining about Oracle because they don't make things for free.
I've never used it for any Rails development, and found the coupling of the Ruby packages with Rails gems, and the presumption in the add-ons that any Ruby project was a Rails project, a bit dopey. There seems to be no way to install the Ruby stuff without the Rail stuff, though.
I much prefer using vim for development, and while there's a vim plugin for Netbeans I typically did serious editing in an external vim instance while using Netbeans for GUI stuff, or for some refactoring, which it does quite well.
For people who like IDEs, Netbeans is a really good Ruby/JRuby editor.
I would say, not a whole lot according to their trend analysis.
Anecdotally, I don't know of a single RoR developer who uses Netbeans. Vim, Textmate and Emacs seem to be the editors of choice.
That being said, emacs is my day-to-day environment, Netbeans was never more than an occasional side tool.
Features I make use of: project navigation, file navigation, syntax highlighting, jump to a declaration, re-indent and very occasional code-complete (mostly for css)
Features I don't use: everything else. I always have a terminal window open with about 5/6 tabs from which i do all my generations, migrations, console, server etc. I use RVM and NetBeans doesn't seem to play nicely with that
Works with JRuby too :)
Just start your Rails server with --debugger and put 'debugger' anywhere in your Rails code that you want a breakpoint at.
What? You pooped in Monty's refrigerator? And you ate the whole... wheel of cheese? How'd you do that? Heck, I'm not even mad; that's amazing.
As to going above and beyond in regards to open source, you'd have to look at where NetBeans came from Sun. Look where all that open source got them.
It's not just one case of support being withdrawn. It's Russian roulette.
This is not a fact, it's merely an article of faith of the religion known as Capitalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowbagger,_the_Infinitely_Prolo...
> To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes [...] it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to [...] NetBeans IDE 7.0. (from http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html )
and
>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE. (from http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubySupport )
So it's just a matter of not having enough resources to support everything.
Ruby and RoR is done basically entirely in-house by NetBeans/Oracle so it seems odd that people are enraged that something they provided for free isn't supported any longer due to normal restrictions.
I'm curious if:
1. People outside Oracle will take over RoR development (the community seems too small) OR
2. People will pledge money to keep the plugin maintained (I somehow doubt this but I would like to see it happen).
Taking a wider view, I love the work to make things better (such as at Xerox PARC), but it hasn't made money for those companies. Which is partly why Sun no longer has any say in Java, or in general research, or indeed in anything at all.
I've gradually moved away from NetBeans as a general Ruby/Rails editor but I often came back for the great debugging support.
Any suggestion for alternative Rails debuggers?
Works really well once you've sorted a few quirks - it's what finally allowed me to fully switch from NetBeans to Vim about a month ago.
Hint: add the following to your .vimrc if using MacVim:
let g:ruby_debugger_progname = 'mvim'Running specific tests is also a snap; just place your cursor in the desired spec and command-shift-r (built in support for spork).
I'm not in any affiliated with JetBrains (swear); just a satisfied customer.
But I always thought that RadRails was pretty good. YMMV
I find it useful to be able to see the current stack, drill into variables, view my code with syntax highlighting, and the current line all at the same time. It helps me understand where I am.
(I won a free license as a prize at a conference a few years back and it's really quite nice.)
The rewrite of ruby-debug for Rubinius currently supports syntax highlighting via CodeRay. See https://github.com/rocky/rbx-trepanning or https://github.com/rocky/rbx-trepanning/wiki/Terminal-Colors for how to set that up.
The github project Emacs interface for the newer series of debuggers is https://github.com/rocky/emacs-dbgr.
But as someone else pointed out, it sounds like you'd be happier using an IDE such as one from JetBrains, Aptana, or Eclipse.
It would make things so much easier for me.
It is a good product and superior to NetBeans in many ways. The price was a little on the higher side though (but worth it anyways). If it comes down, I expect RubyMine to become the de-facto IDE for Ruby/Rails.
They really have to speed it up though. Feels like slogging through mud when compared to TextMate. Not sure if its possible given their java codebase.
export AWT_Toolkit=MToolkit
On Linux, I got tired of Eclipse-based Java apps not working properly - blank windows, as you mentioned being a primary issue.
IDE's still have a few killer features over text editors that I miss when I don't have them.
The message from the netbeans team is that they just didn't have enough resources to support both Rails and upcoming Java 7 and so they had to drop development. They also are encouraging the community to pick up and continue development of Rails support for the IDE.
I guess it's possible that a lack of resources is just an excuse to remove that support, but to me this seems like a genuine reason. I don't get the sense that Oracle just pulled the plug for political reasons.
Highly recommended!
Here's a decent tutorial in setting it up:
http://colonelpanic.net/2010/05/textmate-go-to-file-in-vim/
The tutorial uses Project (I would say complementary more than an alternative to NERDTree). It depends on your needs, and I use both. NERDTree for general navigation, but the way Project buckets content results in some flexibility as well. Along with using netrw to do remote development via scp/rsync, you could also create a hybridized project of local and remote content and run a vimgrep on all files. There are at least a few applications for this with, maybe a quick way to manage config or view log files (if they're small enough) on multiple servers/shards for example.
Additionally you can also have it run scripts to switch dev environments when you switch projects. Project switches are triggered when you open a buffer for a file in a different project. If you are working on several platforms and have multiple build scripts, I find this to be helpful. One limitation though, if you have a split or tab with multiple buffers from different projects, the most recent opened project's environment persists.
So FF + Project's workflow is: (1) keys (,f for me) to "Go To File", (2) type in a search pattern, (3) open a file with your environment fully setup and ready to go. For me it has been pretty good so far over the past year or so with a few minor issues.
Eclipse also has support for Ruby, no?
Sort of sad to see this happen, but I'd prefer they keep netbeans going and streamline it to be really good at a few things, rather than being 'ok' at lots of stuff.
Ruby doesn't really fit with Oracle's offerings, although PHP doesn't either. Perhaps PHP support will be dropped in the future?
To be honest, I frequently use Vim for quick editing but when debugging PHP Netbeans beats Eclipse hands down.
update it was redcar that I used last year, and it has improved quickly (kudos to the project team). That's a great sign. Kinda psyched to have something textmate-ish on ubuntu! The themes are pretty hot, and the bundles are chock full of languages.
I have been using Komodo for a number of languages on a number of platforms.
A Ruby editor, written in Ruby, that you can extend using Ruby.
It's also nice that you don't have to have N dev environments installed to support each language you want to play with. I work in Java, C++, Python, Erlang, HTML, JavaScript, and Ruby fairly regularly. Installing and learning a completely new environment for each would be obnoxious.
I'm using XCode and vim ... XCode for iOS development and for everything else vim. Prior to that I used TextMate ...
After a few weeks of constant vim usage it happens that I start typing vim commands into XCode (or into any other bigger text field). For example I regularly press a/i/o before I start typing the text. Or I try to block mark/yank text selections, etc. instead of use copy and paste :)
After a few weeks of regular usage you start getting a grasp on vim and will constantly ask yourself why all the other editors suck :)
(I tend to use console vim - not macvim. Macvim somehow doesn't feel right.)
For browsing files inside vim I use NERDTree (or if I remember the filename :e <filename>). To quickly open the file's headerfile I use http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=31 - it takes only a :AS to open the file's header file (vice versa) in a new split. (Hint: Map a key to next split/window to switch fast between them. I remapped F1 for this purpose.)
If I really need to have many files open I just open a new tab/window in my terminal emulator. (There are also tabs in vim but I had not a chance to get used to the tab commands yet. gvim/macvim offer more abstract tab support - the tabs are real vim tabs but they are represented as UI tabs. So you can still yank/paste between them but have a more Visual Studio'ish feeling.)
Autoformatting code is controlled under bundles (format all, re-indent text).
Go to definition/declaration is functionally done with go to symbol.
There's support for code completion but I haven't used it much.
I'm wondering how come Oracle hasn't kill NetBeans yet? Considering the effort they've put into Eclipse and the aholes they are this seems a logical move.
(I'm still on TextMate and happy with it, personally :)
That is really all they needed to point out (for me).
>>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.
1.) To focus more on Java
2.) Because the low usage of the RoR NetBeans functionality didn't warrant the effort the team put into it.
Here's some of the reasons I switched:
1) inline syntax checking
2) ability to click through to called method (command + click in os x)
3) ability to have multiple views of the same file (clone window)
4) ability to have split screen editing.
5) debugging
6) inline documentation instantly available for any built in, plugin or internal class (ctrl + space).
7) code completion / suggestion (this is not a lazy thing -- it's helpful for discovering what's available in any given class)
8) indenting in textmate was never fun. In NetBeans just command + shift + f and the whole file is properly indented.
Those are some of my reasons. Hopefully there's something else out there that can replace NetBeans for me. I've been extremely grateful for it -- especially at its price.
If I were running your company, I'd focus more on the individual I was hiring and what they bring to the table, and less on if they're using the hippest tools.