Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

I'm wondering how come Oracle hasn't kill NetBeans yet? Considering the effort they've put into Eclipse and the aholes they are this seems a logical move.

jpcx012• 15 years ago

They've been bought by AppCelerator so I highly doubt their longterm focus is going to be on Ruby. Will probably mainly be Javascript (to support Titanium Mobile)

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/

Eclipse also has support for Ruby, no?

Sort of sad to see this happen, but I'd prefer they keep netbeans going and streamline it to be really good at a few things, rather than being 'ok' at lots of stuff.

Ruby doesn't really fit with Oracle's offerings, although PHP doesn't either. Perhaps PHP support will be dropped in the future?

gaoshan2• 15 years ago

Ugh, I hope not. I've wedded Netbeans to my PHP development process (and projects) rather tightly so the thought of having to switch (especially to something I find inferior like Eclipse) makes me nervous.

bowmande2• 15 years ago

I use TextMate, but have been trying to make the switch to vim.

kj12345• 15 years ago

Are you seeing any benefit yet? (I've tried that switch myself but I think I gave up too early).

davidw• 15 years ago

Emacs + various extensions and goodies.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

This is the killer feature of tools like emacs and vi: Your vendor cannot abandon you and the code has a well-proven capability to be ported to just about any platform.

SoftwareMaven3• 15 years ago

I completely agree with this. Emacs is an amazing environment that can be customized and extended in so many ways. It also has support for just about anything you'd ever want to do.

It's also nice that you don't have to have N dev environments installed to support each language you want to play with. I work in Java, C++, Python, Erlang, HTML, JavaScript, and Ruby fairly regularly. Installing and learning a completely new environment for each would be obnoxious.

ericb• 15 years ago

http://redcareditor.com/

A Ruby editor, written in Ruby, that you can extend using Ruby.

yock• 15 years ago

RadRails and Redmine are going to be the closest to the Netbeans Ruby support, others have mentioned those already. Something closer to the heart of many Ruby developers is Redcar. It's a text editor installed as a Ruby gem generally meant to replicate Textmate functionality.

http://redcareditor.com/

messel2• 15 years ago

I'd love to see a cross platform variant, influenced by TextMate's design. I tried out redcar last year but it wasn't ready for primetime then. I may be confusing redcar with one of many other editors I tried out last year, I'll give it another look.

update it was redcar that I used last year, and it has improved quickly (kudos to the project team). That's a great sign. Kinda psyched to have something textmate-ish on ubuntu! The themes are pretty hot, and the bundles are chock full of languages.

killedbydeath• 15 years ago

Komodo Edit is a nice and very configurable light-weight editor (free): http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit A more functional IDE (paid): http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide

I have been using Komodo for a number of languages on a number of platforms.

melling2• 15 years ago

Netbeans is open source. The plugin is open source. Oracle is simply trying to cut projects where they have no direct or indirect benefit. I'm sure they would be happy if someone else maintained the plugin. Netbeans has a growing community of plugin developers. There is a community Clojure plugin, for example:

http://www.enclojure.org

messel2• 15 years ago

If you're on Mac OS X or can run a VM, TextMate is a wonderful project editor. It was the reason I switched over to Mac for development. It does everything I want for development, and gets out of the way for everything I don't want. It'll take a little to get used to.

Autoformatting code is controlled under bundles (format all, re-indent text).

Go to definition/declaration is functionally done with go to symbol.

There's support for code completion but I haven't used it much.

epochwolf• 15 years ago

I've only found NetBeans useful under Windows. I've had a number of interface problems on Linux and OSX that make it unusable. (Dialogs showing up blank all the time and other problems)

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

I've found netbeans to be faster on windows, certainly. Not had any of the issues you mention on OSX - just general 'java is slow' issues (especially when compared to same version of nb on windows).

On Linux, I got tired of Eclipse-based Java apps not working properly - blank windows, as you mentioned being a primary issue.

subbu• 15 years ago

I have used NetBeans both on Windows as well as on Ubuntu. I haven't noticed slowness on Ubuntu (with 4GB RAM) apart from the loading time. I have switched to VIM since then and haven't used NetBeans in the recent months though.

rufugee2• 15 years ago

Those blank dialog issues are caused by Compiz, not Linux. You can either turn Compiz off, or try setting this in your profile:

export AWT_Toolkit=MToolkit

sagarun• 15 years ago

who cares? I use emacs+rinari

steipete• 15 years ago

use mvim + NERDtree

Corrado• 15 years ago

This morning I went looking for a new IDE to replace Netbeans/Aptana and found VIM + Janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus). Janus is a collection of customizations and plugins that make VIM look & feel almost like a GUI IDE.

Highly recommended!

charlief• 15 years ago

Absolutely agree. I also highly recommend FuzzyFinder if you like TextMate's "Go To File" (CTRL+SHIFT+R Eclipse, CTRL+SHIFT+O NetBeans), and also combined with the Project plugin.

Here's a decent tutorial in setting it up:

http://colonelpanic.net/2010/05/textmate-go-to-file-in-vim/

The tutorial uses Project (I would say complementary more than an alternative to NERDTree). It depends on your needs, and I use both. NERDTree for general navigation, but the way Project buckets content results in some flexibility as well. Along with using netrw to do remote development via scp/rsync, you could also create a hybridized project of local and remote content and run a vimgrep on all files. There are at least a few applications for this with, maybe a quick way to manage config or view log files (if they're small enough) on multiple servers/shards for example.

Additionally you can also have it run scripts to switch dev environments when you switch projects. Project switches are triggered when you open a buffer for a file in a different project. If you are working on several platforms and have multiple build scripts, I find this to be helpful. One limitation though, if you have a split or tab with multiple buffers from different projects, the most recent opened project's environment persists.

So FF + Project's workflow is: (1) keys (,f for me) to "Go To File", (2) type in a search pattern, (3) open a file with your environment fully setup and ready to go. For me it has been pretty good so far over the past year or so with a few minor issues.

thecoffman2• 15 years ago

I use this combination as well with one addition - topfunky's peepopen (http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen). Works like an improved version of Textmate's fuzzy find - even displays Git metadata inline. Its not free - but its worth it imo to have something a little more polished.

sshconnection• 15 years ago

Ugh, I had a feeling this was coming.

sigzero5• 15 years ago

According to the NB guys it was "low usage". It makes sense to spin it out for the community to maintain if they want it.

hopeless3• 15 years ago

Nooooo....

I've gradually moved away from NetBeans as a general Ruby/Rails editor but I often came back for the great debugging support.

Any suggestion for alternative Rails debuggers?

hamletdrc2• 15 years ago

I have heard positive things said about RubyMine from JetBrains. However, it is not free and some complain of slow project parse times at startup. Disclaimer: I do have an off and on professional relationship with JetBrains.

aantix• 15 years ago

RubyMine is amazing for large Rails projects. I can jump between methods in different modules, classes even across gems (a simple command-click on the method, class or module name). You can quickly traverse source trees without the cumbersome grep/find that you'd do in a basic text editor.

Running specific tests is also a snap; just place your cursor in the desired spec and command-shift-r (built in support for spork).

I'm not in any affiliated with JetBrains (swear); just a satisfied customer.

steveklabnik• 15 years ago

ruby-debug?

hopeless3• 15 years ago

urgh... yes I've used it but I was hoping for something a little less 1980's. We can have multiple windows now ;-)

I find it useful to be able to see the current stack, drill into variables, view my code with syntax highlighting, and the current line all at the same time. It helps me understand where I am.

daveungerer• 15 years ago

https://github.com/astashov/vim-ruby-debugger

Works really well once you've sorted a few quirks - it's what finally allowed me to fully switch from NetBeans to Vim about a month ago.

Hint: add the following to your .vimrc if using MacVim:

    let g:ruby_debugger_progname = 'mvim'

thecoffman2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the tip - will be checking this out tonight. Double thanks for the MacVim tip - I'm sure I would have been tripped up and off to Google without it.

mikeryan• 15 years ago

I've moved away from it to just using TextMate.

But I always thought that RadRails was pretty good. YMMV

http://aptana.com/products/radrails

TwoSheds• 15 years ago

NetBeans is open source. At least OpenOffice and Hudson have already been forked. Are there any obstacles (name has to be changed of course) for forking this project as well?

fierarul3• 15 years ago

No need:

>>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.

_pius• 15 years ago

Why do people use NetBeans for Rails?

xentronium• 15 years ago

Because it's fast and it can do code lookups. Rubymine, for example, is order of magnitude slower, even with most features turned off.

SoftwareMaven3• 15 years ago

I would bet a lot of them started as Java developers (who generally must have an IDE) who were experimenting with Ruby and used the tool they had in hand. There are also probably a chunk who want a "real" debugger.

tres• 15 years ago

I started out with textmate way back when. I actually started using NetBeans in hope that it would have decent support for Actionscript 3. I happened to find out about the Rails support later on & was very happy I did.

Here's some of the reasons I switched:

1) inline syntax checking

2) ability to click through to called method (command + click in os x)

3) ability to have multiple views of the same file (clone window)

4) ability to have split screen editing.

5) debugging

6) inline documentation instantly available for any built in, plugin or internal class (ctrl + space).

7) code completion / suggestion (this is not a lazy thing -- it's helpful for discovering what's available in any given class)

8) indenting in textmate was never fun. In NetBeans just command + shift + f and the whole file is properly indented.

Those are some of my reasons. Hopefully there's something else out there that can replace NetBeans for me. I've been extremely grateful for it -- especially at its price.

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

And it had RVM-like features before RVM became popular ... you could specify what version of Ruby and what server (mongrel, web brick or thin ... if you knew what you were doing) you wanted to run your app against

whynotmatt• 15 years ago

I use Netbeans for java and used it when I started working with Ruby. But I switched to RubyMine and really enjoy it. It took me a while to convince myself to pay for an IDE after previously using Netbeans and Eclipse, but the cost isn't high and it has really made me speed up my ruby work.

dirtyhand• 15 years ago

This is actually good news. The company I work at would never hire a Rails developer that uses ANY sort of IDE. Learn to use a good text editor and learn the Rails CLI.

rufugee2• 15 years ago

What about those who know a good text editor, know the Rails CLI, and still prefer an IDE? There are worthwhile features that an IDE can do that a text editor can't (easily).

If I were running your company, I'd focus more on the individual I was hiring and what they bring to the table, and less on if they're using the hippest tools.

jonpaul• 15 years ago

It's pretentious attitudes like this that give some developers a bad name.

andybak• 15 years ago

Cool. What else is your company overly dogmatic about?

noarchy• 15 years ago

This is an unfortunate move, though I expect that the community will do what it can to pick up the pieces here (which Oracle seems to state openly that they want to see happen). NetBeans has improved so much over the years, I hate to see "official" features like this get tossed out.

smitjel• 15 years ago

Now more than ever, give vim + rails.vim a try. You won't bother with bloated IDE's anymore.

msy• 15 years ago

You know between Java, Hudson and moves like this it feels like we're ripe for an Onion-style article about Oracle execs running out of ideas for pissing off the OSS community and so doing a road-trip around the country to individually insult every OSS developer and user in the most graphic and personal way they can think of.

fierarul3• 15 years ago

The OSS community for Hudson (actually, CloudBees) is forking Hudson against Oracle's will.

RoR support is just dropped due to various constraints and the community is actually encouraged to intervene:

>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.

I'm curious if people will pick up RoR support or just continue complaining about Oracle because they don't make things for free.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

How widely is NetBeans used by the RoR community? I'm (purely) guessing not very widely at all.

melling2• 15 years ago

Oracle has a profitable business model. It works for them. They have some open source projects that they no longer care to support. In the open source model, someone else is free to carry the torch. It should only require a few people to adopt the Ruby plugin. There are already lots of Netbeans plugins so the learning curve:

http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal

Complaining about Oracle, or any profit driven company, won't help. Growing open source communities will:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/netbeans-plugins

rst• 15 years ago

A fair point for Rails-on-Netbeans. Not quite so much for Hudson, where Oracle wants not just to stay involved, but to stay in control --- and the amount of control they want is what's pissing off everyone else (including the primary author of the software, Kohsuke Kawaguchi).

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

They have a profitable business model... for now.

They are doing an excellent job of pissing off all of the people who make the purchasing decisions for Oracle products. This isn't the best idea.

AhtiK• 15 years ago

For some background on Hudson vs Oracle there's a related HN post from yesterday, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2144285

erino• 15 years ago

That reminds me of Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged from HHTTG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowbagger,_the_Infinitely_Prolo...

lapusta• 15 years ago

Oracle already invests in JDeveloper & Eclipse, and now the have Netbeans. It's obvious that they wouldn't make each IDE full-featured.

erik_p• 15 years ago

What's that Oracle?

What? You pooped in Monty's refrigerator? And you ate the whole... wheel of cheese? How'd you do that? Heck, I'm not even mad; that's amazing.

vtail3• 15 years ago

I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

ebtalley• 15 years ago

Look at what kind of headway corporations like google have made in the mind of consumers when they go above and beyond the shareholder mantra. Oracle might make short term gains on their terms but they have started to poison a whole new generation of developers.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders.

This is not a fact, it's merely an article of faith of the religion known as Capitalism.

Prolorn• 15 years ago

That they are free to make this choice doesn't mean the community needs to roll over in accepting it. A response to this news that doesn't indicate displeasure would lack integrity.

noibl• 15 years ago

The reason is that Oracle inherited the stewardship of so many important projects when they bought Sun. After the purchase they have not said 'OK guys, new management; we don't do the open source thing; so long.' Rather they put the knife into various projects in different ways, seemingly at random. This behaviour taken in sum has an unsettling effect on the outlook of any project that Oracle is still involved with. How long will Netbeans itself survive? It's anybody's guess.

It's not just one case of support being withdrawn. It's Russian roulette.

jim_h• 15 years ago

It looks like it's time to start learning vim or another alternative.

fierarul3• 15 years ago

The most important parts are:

> To maintain that objective and capitalize on the JDK 7 release themes [...] it is necessary that our engineering resources are committed to [...] NetBeans IDE 7.0. (from http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html )

and

>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE. (from http://wiki.netbeans.org/RubySupport )

So it's just a matter of not having enough resources to support everything.

Ruby and RoR is done basically entirely in-house by NetBeans/Oracle so it seems odd that people are enraged that something they provided for free isn't supported any longer due to normal restrictions.

I'm curious if:

1. People outside Oracle will take over RoR development (the community seems too small) OR

2. People will pledge money to keep the plugin maintained (I somehow doubt this but I would like to see it happen).

hopeless3• 15 years ago

I think you're right. The intersection of interested Ruby developers + with Java experience + knowledge of the Netbeans platform + and motivation/time to maintain the plugin seems vanishingly small.

6ren• 15 years ago

The only thing is that Ruby is still growing, and so represents possible future revenue. But Oracle aims for short-term profitability now... which you have to admit, has worked out pretty well for them.

Taking a wider view, I love the work to make things better (such as at Xerox PARC), but it hasn't made money for those companies. Which is partly why Sun no longer has any say in Java, or in general research, or indeed in anything at all.

torme• 15 years ago

Honestly, I feel like the title here is a little misleading.

The message from the netbeans team is that they just didn't have enough resources to support both Rails and upcoming Java 7 and so they had to drop development. They also are encouraging the community to pick up and continue development of Rails support for the IDE.

I guess it's possible that a lack of resources is just an excuse to remove that support, but to me this seems like a genuine reason. I don't get the sense that Oracle just pulled the plug for political reasons.

grandalf• 15 years ago

Is anybody actually using NetBeans for Ruby? I tried it very early in my exploration of Ruby, but quickly switched to gedit, and eventually emacs (using technomancy's emacs starter kit). Now that I use emacs, any other editor (particularly one that requires a hand on the mouse) feels like an RSI producing nightmare.

jamesbritt2• 15 years ago

Netbeans has some very nice autocomplete, drop-down help, and refactoring and debugging stuff for Ruby, but I could never use it for serous code editing. I liked it for the WYSIWYG GUI editor when building some Ruby GUI apps, but much prefer vim for general coding (vim plugins for Netbeans notwithstanding).

Confusion• 15 years ago

I've used it for a while, but recently switched to RubyMine (with vi bindings). Much snappier, much more complete. Well worth $150.

barmstrong• 15 years ago

I use it daily at CarWoo.com

IDE's still have a few killer features over text editors that I miss when I don't have them.

webuiarchitect2• 15 years ago

You should seriously give Vim a try; I bet you would never go back to any IDE afterwards.

moron4hire• 15 years ago

well, there goes the only reason I ever used NetBeans.

runjake2• 15 years ago

Reasons:

1.) To focus more on Java

2.) Because the low usage of the RoR NetBeans functionality didn't warrant the effort the team put into it.

sigzero5• 15 years ago

"Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature."

That is really all they needed to point out (for me).

jasim2• 15 years ago

RubyMine just tweeted: "We welcome all NetBeans users to start evaluating RubyMine as your new Ruby/Rails IDE! Expect some great news very soon on our pricing page!"

It is a good product and superior to NetBeans in many ways. The price was a little on the higher side though (but worth it anyways). If it comes down, I expect RubyMine to become the de-facto IDE for Ruby/Rails.

sigzero5• 15 years ago

For open source projects it is "free" and $69 for a one developer license. That isn't too bad. I use PyCharm and it is pretty good and the Jetbrains team is always responsive to my questions.

jpcx012• 15 years ago

Yep, I think consolidation in the Ruby IDE space will be a good thing. All the super elite people are using VIM / Emacs, and all the lazy people like me are still using Textmate. If RubyMine can develop a decent size community around it (with plugins, snippets, colors, etc), I'd definitely use it.

They really have to speed it up though. Feels like slogging through mud when compared to TextMate. Not sure if its possible given their java codebase.

DisposaBoy• 15 years ago

Well, it's probably just me but Netbeans support for Ruby was as good as Eclipse(PyDev) support for Python i.e it kinda worked but it left a little to be desired, I for one am not gonna miss it.

empire29• 15 years ago

I'm sure there's much more to it, but my initial reaction was to think it was oracle snubbing salesforce in their acquisition of heroku. In the enterprise (which sf targets) oracle is revered, and a robust oracle IDE does help give credibility to ruby/rails. Aptana and ruby mine are the only other ruby/rails IDE's that your run of the mill IT manager would consider full-featured im aware of, and neither of them are backed by a brand as respected in the enterprise as oracle.

webuiarchitect2• 15 years ago

Who cares? Nobody used it anyway!!

Oracle discontinues Ruby/Rails support for NetBeans

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