Phat Site Blog

(Source: Datamonitor)Oracle has released NetBeans Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, 6.9. NetBeans IDE 6.9 comprises of JavaFX Composer, a visual editor and layout tool for building JavaFX applications.

With JavaFX Composer, organizations can build, visually edit, and debug rich internet applications and bind components to various data sources, including databases and web services.

NetBeans IDE 6.9 also offers OSGi interoperability, enabling developers to create OSGi bundles for applications based on the NetBeans platform. NetBeans IDE 6.9 enables developers to create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications on Java platform, JavaFX and scripting languages. NetBeans IDE 6.9 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Oracle Solaris.

NetBeans IDE 6.9 provides improved editing and development capabilities, including: improved Java language editing; additional support for Java Enterprise Edition 6, including contexts and dependency injection and Java specification requests-299; JavaFX Composer; improved JavaFX script editing and refactoring; support for cascading style sheets (CSS) code completion, find usages, and renaming capabilities for HTML and CSS.

It also provides the ability to code, test, and deploy OSGi bundles with Maven and Felix and bundled Felix container with the ability to deploy other containers, such as Equinox. It supports Spring 3.0 framework; PHP Zend framework, PHP formatting and code completion; Ruby on Rails 3.0 and specification of which gems the IDE should reference.

Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president of tools and middleware for Oracle, said: “NetBeans 6.9 continues the tradition of providing the best open source IDE for Java application developers. this is the first NetBeans release under Oracle’s stewardship, and we have continued to focus on the visual tooling capabilities within the IDE. we believe that the ease-of-use and developer productivity provided by NetBeans is key in helping developers of any skill level take advantage of all of the great Java technologies.”

A service of YellowBrix, inc.

Oracle releases NetBeans IDE 6.9

Coming from a background of developing in languages such as Java, one of thethings that surprised me the most about the Ruby and Rails community, was thecommon practice of not using an Integrated Development Environment. Most of themembers of the community, including the most relevant, were comfortable with just aprogrammer’s editor.

At first I thought it was because, Ruby being a dynamic language, using a full IDE mightbe an overkill. But then I thought of the PHP community, in which several IDEs arepopular, with PHP also being a dynamic language. So I still had to guess why using anIDE was not a common practice within the Ruby on Rails world.

Nowadays, there is a growing list of IDEs with support for Ruby on Rails, but twoyears ago the options were really scarce. back then, I chose to use RadRails because itworked on top of the Eclipse IDEwhich was the tool I was already using forother programming languagesand because it was the only free, open source, andportable option.

Truth is, the first version of RadRails I used was very promising, but still a bit too basic.It featured just a few specialized tools, Ruby syntax colorization, and a slow and faultycode-assistance. as a result, the difference between RadRails and a good programmer’seditor was not really significant. however, as Ruby on Rails gained popularity, RadRailswas vastly improved, and a lot of new features were added.

At the same time, several other IDEs started to provide support for Ruby too. Today,even if many Ruby on Rails developers still don’t use an IDE, a growing number ofthem already.

During these two years, I’ve been developing projects almost exclusively with Ruby onRails; and I developed all of them using RadRails. Of course I have been keeping an eyeon every new IDE with Ruby support, just to see if there were any reasons for changing,but I still didn’t find any.

To me, writing this book is a way of contributing back to the RadRails project. I hope thisbook will help the existing community of users of Aptana RadRails, and will also helpnew users to start working with this tool. Besides, thanks to the Packt Open SourceProject Royalty Scheme, a part of the benefits will be directly paid as a royalty to theRadRails project, so by purchasing this book you are funding a bit of the CommunityEdition of Aptana RadRails.

This book will show you how to get the most of the Community Edition of AptanaRadRails for developing Ruby on Rails projects. apart from the features provided byRadRails, the book will give you an overview of working with the Eclipse IDE,and will show you how to use the Eclipse functionalities that are relevant for Ruby andRails development.

This book is not about the Ruby programming language or the Ruby on Rails framework.even if you don’t need to be an expert, you should already be familiar with the languageand the framework to get the most from this book.

Chapters 1 and 2 will show you how to install and configure Aptana RadRails, and willhelp you find your way around the Eclipse IDE. if you have previous experience withEclipse , and you have already installed Aptana RadRails, then you can proceed directlyto Chapter 3.

Chapters 3 to 8 are a complete reference to each of the components of RadRails,including all the configuration options.

Finally, in Chapter 9 you will find documentation about some complementary pluginsyou can use for connecting to a database and for managing your source repositories.

You can find below a brief introduction to each of the chapters.

Chapter 1: this chapter will introduce you the concept of IDE and will give you ageneral overview of what you can expect from Aptana RadRails. You will also findinstructions about how to install Aptana RadRails and the Eclipse IDE in your system.even if you should already be familiar with the installation of Ruby and Rails, the chapteralso provides a quick reference for installing Ruby and Ruby on Rails on Windows,Linux, and OSX.

Chapter 2: in most cases, Aptana RadRails will work directly out of the box. however, insome cases you will need to make a minimal configuration of the IDE. the first part ofthis chapter will show you the basic configuration of RadRails.

Chapter 3: Two of the basic tools RadRails provides are the Ruby Explorer and theConsole View. with the Ruby explorer you will be able to browse the structure of yourprojects and perform any kind of file-related operations, including working with the localhistory of your files. the console view will display the output of most of the processeswe will launch from RadRails. apart from learning how to use these views, we will showhow to use Generators and Rake Tasks from Aptana RadRails to create a simple demoapplication. You will also learn how to start and stop your servers and how to use thebuilt-in browser to watch your application in action.

Chapter 4 explains in detail all the built-in capabilities of RadRails for developing Rubycode. You will learn to use the Ruby Editor to write your source code, to navigatebetween the different classes and files, and to get the most out of code completion and thecode templates.

Chapter 5: One of the strong points of Aptana RadRails is the great support for the clientsideof your application: JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. in this chapter you will learn howto write Rails views mixing together Ruby code with HTML or JavaScript and gettingassistance for all of the languages.

Chapter 6: When an application grows large, it’s always a good idea to have a way ofdebugging the potential errors. this chapter will show you how to use RadRails’ built-indebugger for interacting with your code at run time. You will learn to start a server or astand-alone script in debug mode, how to set breakpoints , and how to intercept any Rubyexceptions. the debugger will also allow you to walk through your code, to examine thevalues of any variables and expressions, and even to execute arbitrary code at run time byusing the Display view.

Chapter 7: apart from the coding and debugging, Aptana RadRails provides a number ofspecialized tools to make the development and management of your application easier. Inthe context of Eclipse, each of these tools is called a View. in this chapter, you will learnhow to use the different views to browse the Ruby and Rails documentation, manage andmonitor your servers, install gems and plugins, launch generators and rake tasks, use codeannotations, keep track of warnings and to-do lists, evaluate regular expressions, and runyour tests. if you prefer to use the command line, then you will learn how to takeadvantage of the built-in Rails Shell, in which you can get auto-completion for the mostused Ruby and Rails commands directly at the command line. this chapter will alsoshow you how to use your IDE to control external servers such as Apache or MySQL.

Chapter 8: Out of the box, Aptana RadRails provides a fully working environment.however, many of its components allow for some configuration. this chapter is acomplete reference to all the preferences you can set to change the user experience whenusing RadRails.

Chapter 9: Aptana RadRails bundles together plenty of interesting features for thedeveloper. however, since the focus is on Ruby on Rails, there are some general aspectsof the development of a project that are not covered by RadRails. Fortunately, since theunderlying platform is the Eclipse IDE, we have a virtually unlimited number ofcomplementary plugins to choose from. this chapter will give you a general overview ofthe Eclipse plugins ecosystem, and will also explain in detail how to use two of theplugins you might want to use when developing. DBViewer is a plugin you can use toconnect to your database from the IDE. this chapter will show you how to set up theplugin, and how to use it for examining and modifying your database structure andcontents. Subclipse is a plugin to connect to Subversion repositories. By using Subclipseyou will have repository access directly from your IDE. Besides, the built-in features ofSubclipse will help you examine and merge changes in a much more comfortable waythan using the Subversion command line.

When developing a Rails project, there are more things to do than the source codeitself. We have to start, stop, and monitor our servers, generate code templates, runour test suites, install plugins and gems, generate documentation, keep controlof to-do items, or run Rake tasks for different purposesdatabase migrations,for example.

RadRails provides different views for supporting these tasks that are a part ofthe development but not of the coding itself. and, of course, it does it so we cancontrol everything from within the IDE without having to go back to thecommand-line interface.

We already had a glimpse of some of these features when using the Generators,Rake, or Servers views briefl y when we needed them in previous chapters. now youwill learn how to take full advantage of all the RadRails views, to help you take careof routine processes and just focus on getting things done.

Some of the views that we will go through in this chapter are available as part ofthe Rails default perspective, which means you don’t need to do anything specialto open them; they will appear as tabbed views in a pane at the bottom of yourworkbench. just look for the tab name of the view you want to see and click on it tomake it visible.

However, there are some views that are not opened by default, or maybe you closedthem at some point accidentally, or maybe you changed to the Debug perspectiveand you want to display some of the RadRails views there. When you need to opena view whose tab is not displaying, you can go to the Window menu, and select theShow View option.

If you are in the Rails perspective, all the available views will be displayed in thatmenu, as you can see in the screenshot above. When opening this menu from adifferent perspective, you will not see the RadRails views here, but you can selectOther… as we did in previous chapters. if this is the case, in the Show View dialog,most of the views will appear under the Ruby category, except for the Generators,Rails API, and Rake Tasks views, which are located under Rails.

As happens with any modern programming language, Ruby has an extensiveAPI. there are lots of libraries and classes and even with Ruby being an intuitivelanguage with a neat consistent API, often we need to read the documentation.

As you probably know, Ruby provides a standard documentation format calledRDoc, which uses the comments in the source code to generate documentation. Wecan access this RDoc documentation in different ways, mainly in HTML formatthrough a browser or by using the command-line tool RI. this produces a plain-textoutput directly at the command shell, in a similar way to the man command in aUNIX system.

RadRails doesn’t add any new functionalities to the built-in documentation, butprovides some convenient views so we can explore it without losing the context ofour project’s source.

This view provides a fast and comfortable way of browsing the local documentationin the same way as you would use RI from the command line.

You can look either for a class or a method name. just start typing at the input boxat the top left corner of the view and the list below will display the matching entries.That’s a nice improvement over the command line interface, since you can see theresults as you type instead of having to run a complete search every time.

If you know the name of both the class and the method you are looking for, thenyou can write them using the hash (pound) sign as a separator. for example, to getthe documentation for the sum method of the class Enumerable you would writeEnumerable#sum.

The documentation will display in the right pane, with a convenient highlighting ofthe referenced methods and classes. even if the search results of RI don’t look veryattractive compared to the output of the HTML-based documentation views, RI hasthe advantage of searching locally on your computer, so you can use it even whenworking off-line.

Develop Ruby on Rails applications fast using RadRails 1.0 …