Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Visual environment eyed for Ruby on Rails

analysis
Jan 25, 20081 min

SapphireSteel Software, which has specialized in development tools for Ruby programmers, plans to soon release a visual design environment for Ruby on Rails, to be named The Visual Rails Workbench. Due in late-February, the environment will be an addition to SapphireSteel's Ruby In Steel Developer IDE, which is a Ruby development tool for Visual Studio users. In addition to a design workspace, the workbench will

SapphireSteel Software, which has specialized in development tools for Ruby programmers, plans to soon release a visual design environment for Ruby on Rails, to be named The Visual Rails Workbench.

Due in late-February, the environment will be an addition to SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel Developer IDE, which is a Ruby development tool for Visual Studio users. In addition to a design workspace, the workbench will feature tools to navigate through ERb templates and to drag and drop components. ERb is the native Rails view format, SapphireSteel said.

“The main benefit [of the workbench] is that, for the first time Rails developers will be able to design complete Web pages including styles, colors, graphics and forms,” said SapphireSteel Director of Technology Huw Collingbourne, in an email.

Developers also will be able to import and export pages to and from external HTML editors. The Visual Rails Workbench will be part of Ruby in Steel 1.2 Developer.

A screen shot of the workbench can be found here.

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.

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