Ruby on the rise

Ruby the programming language has been around for quite a while, though quite popular in Japan, it never made any inroads into the mainstream of computing.  Only recently it made quite a splash with the emergence of Ruby on Rails (RoR) as an alternative web application framework.  Yet it still remains stuck in the peripherals, with Java and .NET dominating the corporate computing space.  A sad fate indeed for probably the best dynamic object oriented language in geek lore.

But Ruby's fate is about to take a detour, with the upcoming Ruby IDE from CodeGear (the company formerly known as Borland, then Inprise, then Borland again!) and suprise surprise - Netbeans 6.0.  The latter has a preview download while the former is still vaporware. 

So will Ruby finally become mainstream and pose a threat to java and c#?    I will probably have an answer to that after I have installed Netbeans 6.0.  The problem is, I might enjoy it a lot and decide to never look back. 

Published 06-23-2007 6:41 AM by smash

Comments

# re: Ruby on the rise@ Saturday, June 23, 2007 2:06 AM

Aptana already is capable of handling Ruby+Rails with its latest incarnation(it combines RadRails IDE w/c it recently acquired)..

by bonskijr

# re: Ruby on the rise@ Monday, June 25, 2007 12:23 AM

Thanks for the heads up bonskijr!  The last time I downloaded Aptana they have this teaser about Ruby and somehow it slipped my mind.

BTW, the Netbeans 6.0 Ruby support looks and feels great. And I also got to test the improvements they made on their Swing GUI designer called Matisse, and I'm very surprised to discover that it works a lot better than the previous version.  

It got me thinking about giving Java another go.  But ofcourse if they can make a Java based Ruby compiler (JRuby) then maybe they can also make a C#  compiler too.  :)

by smash

# re: Ruby on the rise@ Monday, June 25, 2007 1:06 AM

my free cd of Netbeans arrived yesterday.. didn't know they already have 6.0.. and supports ruby.. 5.5 seems ok although the idiosyncrasies of java vs .net that I have to settle first :P

I think I'll wait for IronRuby to mature further w/c I think they'll implement the soonest..

by bonskijr