[FR-devel] Why Practical Ruby ?

[Baptiste Lepilleur]

    When I decided to learn ruby, I started using RubyWin (I never managed
to get used to Xemacs). As I started coding more serious code, I soon became
frustrated with many little details (smart indent bug, lack of automatic
clear of the console output and the lack of shortcut for the Find command).

    I gave a look at the RubyWin project, and foudn that it had been
inactive for a long while. The code was clean but pure WIN32, which
translate for me by 'slow' development.

    I started looking at other project and found FreeRide (but failed to
find the ML at that time). At a first glance, I concluded by 'ambitious but
still in the stage of infancy': the only code in the CVS repository was
(is?) the plug-in architecture. Activity seems slow too (PDF snapshot of
Wiki not updated in more than a year, though it might be picking up given
the number of recent sucribers), and while the plug-in architecture and the
GUI framework are fairly explained, there is very little about other areas
(live syntax error detection, refactoring, debugging...).

    I ended up creating Practical Ruby: an IDE that would be operational in
a
short time. I took the extreme way and came up with the MFC/ruby mixte as
the fastest way to implement it (for me at least), prefering features to
flexbility. It seems I'm on the correct path (3 days since the proof of
concept, and I already have braces matching/mismatch, a fair smart indent,
bookmarks, multiple files open, and file save). I'm now using Pratical Ruby
to develop Pratical Ruby...

    As I'm using the Scintilla component which seems to be the edit
component chosen for FOX, many of the problems I'm running into (and
sometime solving) are identical. Since all the worker code is written using
ruby, I should be able to merge some of the feature developped for FreeRide
(like the parser), to see how it operates in a 'live' environment.

    Baptiste.
---
Baptiste Lepilleur <address@hidden>
http://gaiacrtn.free.fr/