News

IDE Supporting Rails 3.0 Released by JetBrains

• By John K. Waters
• December 1, 2010

A software development tools maker headquartered in the Czech Republic may be the first vendor to release an IDE that supports Rails 3.0.

Prague-based JetBrains this week announced the general availability of its RubyMine tool set.

JetBrains is the company that created the venerable code-centric Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA, one of the relatively few such tools to survive the Eclipse juggernaut. Like IntelliJ, the company's RubyMine development environment is known for its intelligent refactoring and code analysis capabilities. The focus of RubyMine, however, is the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework, explained the product's lead developer Dennis Ushakov.

"We are doing our best to keep RubyMine on the cutting edge," he said, "which is a must with a technology as dynamic as Ruby on Rails."

RubyMine 3.0 is designed to provide complete support for Rails 3.0 including the latest versions of the Ruby gems.

It addition to its support of Ruby on Rails 3.0, the third generation of the framework, which was released in August, the most striking change in the RubyMine 3.0 release might be the RCov-based Ruby code coverage integration inside the IDE. Rcov is a tool for collecting code coverage information for Ruby. It's used mostly when running tests to track which lines of the production code are exercised by tests. RubyMine is designed to load the data collected by RCov and displays it in its user interface.

RubyMine 3.0 makes code coverage reports available for Rails, Ruby Script, Test::Unit, Shoulda, Cucumber, RSpec run configurations and for Rake tasks.

But there's also an improved Ruby code editor that recognizes more languages, such as LESS and SASS, which are alternative syntaxes for writing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) style sheets.

RubyMine 3.0 already integrates with several version control systems (VCS), including Subversion, Perforce, CVS, and Git. This release improves the IDE's integration with Git, and adds support for the Mercurial VCS.

The company has also reworked the IDE's UI, Ushakov said, for its supported platforms (Windows, Mac OS and Linux). And there's a new Mozilla Firefox browser plugin for debugging JavaScript code from RubyMine in the same debugger UI, with conditional breakpoints, frames/variables/watches views and evaluate expression function.

JetBrains is offering a free, 30-day evaluation of RubyMine 3.0.

In related news, the company says that it's nearly finished with the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA 10, the latest version of its Java IDE. The tool set reached release candidate stage this week, the company said.