Netbeans

Self introduction

Hi All,

A week ago or so, one of my friends told me about your effort to save
the NetBeans's ruby support. I want to help.

Here is my self introduction:

Who:

Tsutomu Kuroda

What:

I'm a developer, instructor and tech writer specialized on Ruby and Rails.
I have some experiences with Java GUI programming, but my knowledge
should be rather outdated.

When:

Free time

Why:

I and my colleagues use the NetBeans 6.9.1 all the time as the platform
for Rails development. And I need a good IDE when I teach Ruby programming.
I appreciate the NetBeans because it works on many OSs and is very
intuitive for beginers.

Where:
Tokyo, Japan.

Regards,
Tsutomu

Sources for Ruby NetBeans support?

Hi,

Someone tell me how to get sources for Ruby NetBeans support?
I cloned NetBeans *main*, which is, probably, equivalent to *master*
in git. But, it doesn't have Ruby support, just has logs of ruby.xxxx
files. So, I guess, I need to rewind back to the revision or tagged
version that has Ruby support. This should be fairly easy, maybe one
or two commends. However, I haven't used Mercurial before, so I don't
know how to get started.

Does anyone know how to do that, or give me a clue to do that?

-Yoko

Re: Who/What/When/Why...

Who: 
Rob Nichols aka ReggieB
Ruby developer. Almost entirely Rails projects.

What: 
Negligible Java, so what I can: testing? documentation?

When:
Spare time

Why:
I've developed Ruby projects using NetBeans since 2008. I think it is
the best IDE for Rails 2 development. I'd like to be able to keep on
using it. 

NetBeans 7.0 Beta is out and Ruby and Rails does not show up...

I figured out how to install it via plugins and posted some
instructions for those of us who want to play with NB 7 and still use
Ruby suppport too:

http://blog.enebo.com/2011/02/installing-ruby-support-in-netbeans-70.html

-Tom

--

-- 
blog: http://blog.enebo.com       twitter: tom_enebo
mail: tom.enebo@...

Who/What/When/Why...

Who:

Masaki Katakai

What:

I'm not a developer of NetBeans and Ruby but I'd like to help
at localization process. I'm a technical lead of NetBeans
globalization in Oracle and project owner of NetBeans
localization community (nblocalization.netbeans.org).
We're providing many language localizations for NetBeans Platform and IDE.

When:

free time

Why:

We're localizing modules of standard IDE distribution usually.
So once modules move out from the distribution, it will be
out of scope in our localization plan. I'd like to continue
to provide localizations for major languages.

Regards,
Masaki

--

-- 
Masaki Katakai
http://blogs.sun.com/katakai

Who/What/When/Why...

As I mentioned in my blog entry, I will be contributing spare time to
this project.  I suspect this will be true of every one here.  If you
are interested in helping then you should introduce yourself.    I
figure answering the following questions will help in getting to know
each other better:

Who:

Thomas Enebo

What:

Day to day programming in both Java and Ruby.  I am co-lead of the
JRuby project so I know JRuby-related things well.  I also can work
with the grammar NB Ruby uses since it is based on the JRubyParser
project that we support via JRuby.

As far as NetBeans skills...I admit they are currently pretty weak.  I
did play with nbgit module a year or two ago, so I have at least a
little exposure, but I am still staunchy a NetBeans novice.

When:

Nights and Weekends or generally when I have some free time.

Why:

I think it would be a shame for something this useful to just bitrot.
I also use NetBeans daily and probably do about 50% of my Ruby coding
in it (the other 50% is in emacs for mysterious reasons).

-Tom

--

-- 
blog: http://blog.enebo.com       twitter: tom_enebo
mail: tom.enebo@...

Ruby NetBeans support!

Blogged here also: http://blog.enebo.com/2011/02/ruby-on-netbeans-lives.html

Ruby on NetBeans lives!

The NetBeans team reported that they were dropping Ruby support in
their IDE. They also said they were hoping that someone in the
community could pick up support. Over the last couple of weeks I have
been talking to the NetBeans team about how the community can take
over support. I have also been trying to educate myself a bit more in
what it would mean to support Ruby in NetBeans. The short of it is:
Ruby NetBeans will continue to live and hopefully thrive via community
support.

The rest of this entry will explain why Ruby on Netbeans is important
and how the community can support this effort. Hopefully, by the time
you are done reading this, you will want to help out!

Why is NetBeans Ruby support important?

The truth is virtually every Java programmer on the planet is using
one of a small handful of IDEs. The big ones are NetBeans, Eclipse,
and Intellij. When a Java programmer decides to look at new language
one of the first questions they ask is: Is there an IDE for it?
Or...Does that run on NetBeans? JRuby (and Ruby) has quite a bit of
motivation for Ruby support in Java IDEs because we see it as one less
hurdle for a Java programmer who wants to try out Ruby.

This last paragraph may explain part of the motivation from the
perspective of a Ruby evangelist... but it says nothing about the
usefulness of Ruby on NetBeans. The editor is great. It has many
conveniences like snippets, context sensitive navigation, live
debugging, Rails support (2.x), and so much more. As a tool, it would
be a great loss for all this work to disappear. As a programmer who
spends most of his day in NetBeans, losing Ruby support would be a
tragic loss.

A plea for contributors

I work on JRuby full-time. For me, hacking on NetBeans will be an OSS
project where I contribute during my spare time. Several other JRuby
folks will also volunteer some time under the same conditions: Yoko
Harada, Charles Nutter, and Nick Sieger. Don’t be fooled though...you
do not have to be a JRuby hacker to work on this project....in fact in
the not-so-distant future you might not even need to to know any Java
(more on this later).

Another treasure trove of expertise will come from Erno Mononen. Erno
was one of the Ruby NetBeans engineers until his departure from
Oracle. He makes no promises in how much time he can provide since he
will also be contributing in his free time, but he should be an
invaluable resource. Even if we only get to occasionally ask him
questions.

Also Geertjan Wielenga, who has been helping answering questions about
undertaking this community support and also pointing me towards
NetBeans training resources has also offered his help.

So we have a few people who are offering to help make this a reality,
but we can use all the help we can get. If you are interested in
helping you should join the dev mailing list dev AT ruby.netbeans.org
(instructions on how to access mailing:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubyCommunityInformation). Introduce yourself
and your interests in helping out.

Infrastructure

We are going to continue to leverage as much of NetBeans
infrastructure as we can. I mentioned continuing to use their mailing
lists. We can continue to use their issue tracker. The hg repo will
still remain the normative source for what gets released. However, in
an attempt to make things easier to develop, we plan on mirroring the
hg repo on github.com. Rubyists are huge git fans. Adding a git
repository will lend a lot more visibility to the project. The git
mirror has not been set up yet because we haven’t figured out how much
of NetBeans should be mirrored.

By staying on NetBeans infrastructure it will be an easier path to get
free continuous integration support on
http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson and it will also make it simpler
to integrate into NetBeans AutoUpdate process.

Stay tuned for announcements about the upcoming github mirror. At the
same time we announce the mirror we should have a simplified document
on how to build Ruby NetBeans.

First steps

0. Simplify the Build process so it is trivial to get started

Let's face it...cloning 1.2Gb to compile a module is a barrier to
entry. It is possible to compile without cloning all of NB source, but
specifying the 10+ Ruby-related projects you need to clone is a little
confusing (to me at least :) ).

1. Restart continuous integration testing on http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson

2. Mirror hg source on github.com

This will be easy once we nail down simplifying the build process.

3. Unbundle JRuby source

Currently, a full version of JRuby’s source gets checked into the
repository and then it gets patched. The delta of things patched is
very small and we should be able to eliminate the need for patching.

We will still depend on JRuby as a jar (see next step).

4. Use JRuby embedding support to write portions of Ruby NetBeans in
the Ruby language

All people interested in Ruby NetBeans support already know Ruby. Not
all of them know Java. Having strategic portions written in Ruby will
help improve the amount of contributions we get.

We shouldn’t go hog wild about replacing things which work already,
but this is a good opportunity to implement new things in a way which
will allow Ruby hackers to contribute to Ruby NB.

5. Re-prioritize issues and get volunteers to work on them

There are currently 600 open issues. Many of these will need to be
re-prioritized based on the level of support we can provide.

Here are the some of the important ones:

   1. Rails 3 support (only Rails 2.3 current supported)
   2. Bundler support
   3. 1.9 syntax
   4. Crashers

Personally, I plan on hacking on 1.9 syntax first since I have the
most experience with this task and Ruby 1.9 is becoming too important
to not support it.

People can come on the dev mailing list and talk about what they want
to work on.

Conclusion

Ruby on NetBeans is already an impressive project, but like any OSS
project it needs maintenance and care. If you think Ruby on NetBeans
is important and you’re thinking about helping...please do. Even if
you know nothing about NetBeans internals or you have never
contributed to an OSS project before: Jump in head first! Getting
involved in OSS is always a great learning experience and you will be
a better person for it.

--

-- 
blog: http://blog.enebo.com       twitter: tom_enebo
mail: tom.enebo@...

How To Contribute To Netbeans Ruby Support

Re: I want to help

Luckily and sadly I am a Java & Ruby developer (among others) who
adores Netbeans when compared to the horrible UX of alternatives.

Therefore I will be submitting patches to help foster Ruby's support in
Netbeans and ensure it stays inline with Ruby and RoR developments.

Although its usage for Ruby based development isn't as big as
alternatives I'd say there is definitely at least several thousand of
us and I'd say that is enough reason to keep its development going
aside from the fact that the alternatives are poor in comparison.

So I will go through and record the process of pulling the source,
creating/submitting a patches, etc... in a blog article as well.

Regards,
Gregory Kornblum

I want to help

Hello Community,

how can I help the keep the ruby support alive in netbeans ?

Are there any issues or is there a road map which I can attend to ? 

Best Regards to all,
Haluk