Paul Krill
Editor at Large

CodeGear shines up Ruby on Rails tool

news
May 14, 20072 mins

Merging of command line and IDE capabilities also featured

CodeGear is introducing on Monday developer tools for Ruby on Rails and C++ and also is featuring new technology to merge IDE and command line capabilities.

Referred to as CodeGear’s IDE for Ruby on Rails, the product is available for beta testing with general availability planned for the latter half of this year, CodeGear said. It will be touted at the RailsConf 2007 event in Portland, Ore., later this week. Ruby on Rails is a popular open source Web framework.

A Rails-centric development environment is featured for beginners and experts, CodeGear said. The company is seeing a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails from Java shops, said Michael Swindell, vice president of products at CodeGear.

Debuting in the Rails product is a function called Commanders, which features command line and IDE capabilities. Some developers like to work with the command line whereas others prefer an IDE, Swindell noted.

“The Commander merges those two worlds together,” providing an integrated tool with the power of IDE tools at the command line and the flexibility of the command line for an IDE developer, Swindell said.

Commander also is expected to be added to the company’s Delphi and JBuilder products at some point, Swindell said.

Other capabilities in the Ruby IDE include code completion, refactoring, type browsing, and navigation. Development and deployment modules are featured for Ruby, Rails, and Gems.

In the open source arena, CodeGear is supporting the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit for Ruby with patches and code contributions.

CodeGear’s C++Builder 2007 tool provides rapid application development of C++ applications. Featured is support for building applications on the new Windows Vista OS.

Developers can upgrade existing C++ applications to Vista or build new ones that take advantage of Vista capabilities, such as Aero graphical interface technology, CodeGear said. Applications also can be built for Windows 2000 and XP.

Additionally, rich client applications can be built. Developers also can build AJAX-enabled (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web applications.

Other features in C++Builder 2007 include increased ANSI C++ conformance and IDE build performance improvements. UML (Unified Modeling Language) source code visualization also is highlighted.

C++ Builder 2007 ships in June. The enterprise-level version, featuring links to major databases, costs $1,299 for upgrades and $1,999 for new users.

CodeGear currently is the development tools arm of Borland Software.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

More from this author