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Mini Project on The State of IntelliSense/Coding Aid in Ruby IDE’s
Following my return to Denmark and Aalborg University I’ve had to do a mini project to get my entire 9th semester transferred. This project has been handed in and so I thought I’d publish it here as well.
The abstract is as follows:
This report evaluates the state of Coding Aid in Ruby IDE. First a
definition of Coding Aid (aka IntelliSense and Content Assist) and its
components (Method, Variable, Parameter, and Keyword Completion, Code Expansion
and Inline Documentation) is provided. This is followed by a discussion of the
problems involved in creating Coding Aid for a dynamicaly typed language like
Ruby — a comparison between Smalltalk and Java is used. Via a set of code
examples illustrating the problematic features of dynamic languages 9 IDE
are tested.
The result is that Sapphire in Steel — a plugin for Microsoft Visual
Studio 2005 — and IDE utilizing rcodetools (TextMate, Vim, and Emacs)
perform best.
You can download the entire mini project here: The State of Coding Aid in Ruby IDE’s. And you’re welcome to comment on it here.
After handing in the project I noticed this blog post Ruby / Rails IDE Comparison : Idea, Netbeans, RadRails that looks into the same things that I investigate. Their study is pretty comprehensive and includes a feature comparison of the IDE’s.
The whole idea with the mini project was to fullfill the requirements from the Studyboard, but since I had to do some work I might as well do something that related to my thesis work. I’m working with two other guys (Martin and Peter), and we’re doing Type Inference on Ruby code. It’s very interesting, and it gives you an excuse for looking into Ruby.
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One Response to 'Mini Project on The State of IntelliSense/Coding Aid in Ruby IDE’s'
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on March 25th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Hi Kristinan,
Nice Comparison! Unfortunately Eclipse DLTK did not had Ruby support at the moment of your work, hope it would be considered for future (please take a look at http://www.eclipse.org/dltk and/or moview showing DLTK’s Code Assist features: http://us.xored.com/~haiodo/EclipseCon07/dltk-ruby.mov)
Also I’m very interested to know how CPA could be applied to the TI problem (found a note on Peter’s site) and would be happy to talk to you, guys if you’re interested in any kind of collaboration.
Kind Regards,
Andrey Platov
DLTK Project Team