ActiveBlog

This week NetBeans announced they're dropping support for Ruby on Rails, starting with the next version, due next spring.

Coincidentally, I've been revising the Rails support in Komodo during the last few weeks. In light of the NetBeans news, it makes more sense to report my road map, rather than wait for the revised Rails support to ship.

Komodo's Rails Support

Komodo's support consists of a Project Template, which lets you build a project, with a set of related macros for working with Rails. I'm working on an extension, which will make it easier to immediately support both versions 2 and 3 of Rails, as well as make it more future-proof to quickly handle newer versions of Rails. The extension will provide a preference panel that slips in under the Languages > Ruby pref, and will let you specify where Rails lives, as well as which database you prefer to work with. In particular, this will make life easier for using the Debian/Ubuntu Rails package, as opposed to the standard Rails gem.

We haven't seen the "existing low usage trends" that the NetBeans blog mentions. While the hype has trailed off from its peak around 2006, the Rails community solved one problem with their merger with Merb, and we find people are still deploying new sites with the framework.

In related news, the Komodo team still has no immediate plans to add Java support to the IDE.