ruby

For years now I've been working on tools that help build and debug Rails applications, but other than the Candidate Buzz demo application, I haven't actually created many myself.

For the past few months, as we've been talking to large enterprises about Stackato and their private PaaS plans, some interesting IT strategies have emerged around the role of languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP play in the mix with Java.

There's a very handy but sometimes overlooked feature of the stackato client that we'd like to let you know more about. I often have to remind myself to point it out when I'm doing demos for people, as it's something that I've quickly come to take for granted.

As Diane Mueller mentioned in a post back in August, we've partnered with New Relic to provide application-level monitoring of apps running on Stackato.

Win yourself an Amazon Kindle and major bragging rights!

As part of the beta launch for ActiveState's Stackato cloud platform, we've written a Rails app that tracks the tweet activity on some of the players in the upcoming American presidential election (only less than 16 months away as I write this!). You can read more about CandidateBuzz here.

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

Coding is fun, but typing is work. Komodo IDE provides several features that let you do less typing so you can have more fun.

The most obvious keystroke-saving feature is autocomplete, but Komodo also has a method for inserting snippets of code by typing their name in the buffer. We call this feature Abbreviations.

Komodo's Rx Toolkit is a debugger for pattern-matching. It lets you tweak patterns (or regular expressions, also known as "regexes", hence the "Rx") against subject text, showing you the results interactively. You can choose to see a single match, all matches, replacements, or even the result of "splitting" the string on the regex. While very powerful, patterns can quickly become complex and unwieldy, so it's useful to have a tool to try them out in isolation.

In Jeffrey Hammond's recent article on Dr. Dobb's (What Developers Think, January 16, 2010), his survey results highlighted something we have known for some time based on the developers and companies that we talk to:

Managers don't know everything their developers are using or doing.

His survey showed that:

• 80% of developers say they use open source components for development or application deployment
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