WYSIWYG IDE, etc

Rails
1

I’m new to Ruby, so don’t be too hard on me.

Is there a great visual editor for Ruby?

Also can Ruby on Rails (RoR) work with any other databases other than
the ones listed in the documentation, I need to connect to SQLBase?

Can Ruby be used to create standalone Applications (like Java)?
If yes, does it create native looking apps?

Can it be use in Client-Side and/or Server side web development?

Does Ruby have any AJAX components that are part of a WYSIWYG IDE (see
first question)?

Thanks

P.S. It is taking me sometime to get used to how things work in Ruby,
but so far it’s a great language!!

2

I’ve just jumped from my “old faithful” vim to RadRails - impression
after a few days is that it’s very good. IMHO the power of vim is
less important with Ruby/Rails, where the majority of your
methods/views tend to be under (say) 20-30 lines long.

As far as an “IDE” goes, there isn’t one along the lines of e.g.
Visual Studio. However, RadRails + NVU is a combination that I’m very
happy with - you “draw” the forms with NVU, then take the HTML/CSS
from NVU, move it into Rails views/partials and then edit
views/partials/controllers to suit. That’s massively simplifying it,
but it’s quite intuitive and extremely productive once you get your
head around it.

HTH

Davee M.

3

Regg Mr wrote:

Is there a great visual editor for Ruby?

I am personal quite against IDEs. To write HTML I have always preferred
a good text editor (with HTML facilities). On the Mac you can consider
BBEdit or TextMate (but since TM has a lot of facilities to work with
Rails, I would consider it directly).

HTML is not that hard and writing by hand (of course aided by the
editor, if you want to) gives you a great amount of control and it is
likely that you will produce cleaner code.

I’m speaking about HTML since you will be working with “rhtml”, that is
to say HTML with embedded ruby. Something a good text editor manages
easily.

I would not advise any IDE/Visual Editor. Unless it is fully
rails-aware, you would miss the best from rails.

For example it quite common to define “partials”. For example in a
single file you can define the way a post/message/customer/whatever is
presented, and then where you need to show it, you call the partial.

It is something similar to define a function and recall it from a
conceptual point of view. This way of working simplifies mantainance and
makes you write less code.
And it is something you would not use with a Visual Editor, I’m afraid.

Can Ruby be used to create standalone Applications (like Java)?
If yes, does it create native looking apps?

Yes, but it is not a matter of Rails. “native looking apps” depends on
the OS: I know for sure that with MacOS X you can use the RubyCocoa
binding (and you get native looking apps).

In the *nix world there is plenty of toolkits that can be used with Ruby
(qt and gtk2 just to name two). Again they are “native looking”.
And then you can use cross-platform toolkits like wx (well qt and gtk
are quite cross-platform too, but that’s another story). And they look
quite good.

I don’t work on windows, but I suppose that since you can call Windows
API, you should be able to use its native graphical system. However you
should get good looking apps using wx or gtk, too.

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4

And what might NVU be? :slight_smile:

-Nb

On 5/15/06 11:44 PM, “David M.” [email protected] wrote:

but it’s quite intuitive and extremely productive once you get your

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Nathaniel S. H. Brown                        http://nshb.net
5

Nathaniel B. wrote:

And what might NVU be? :slight_smile:

http://www.google.com/search?q=nvu

6

After my experience wtih a lot of .NET guys at my work environment,
GUI editors tend to make crappy code. e.g. visual studio not allowing
an element to have a class and and id out of the box. creating ids
that are 30 characters long for no good reason.

I am a firm believer that the best way to learn all of this stuff is
to just type by hand over and over again. HTML, Ruby, Rails standard
constructs, etc. The more you do it, the better you’ll be and the
better understanding you’ll have of it. GUI editors tend to create a
crutch in my experience and they limit the user more so than enable
them.

Ruby can be used for anything. If there’s not a DB connector already
written, I would anticipate it would take a new user a few weeks to
figure out how to get them talking on the back end. There are
probably other users with a similar need.

Ruby can be compiled. It’s not like a .jar tho.

Rails has the AJAX components. Rails is built with ruby (it’s a
framework).

On May 16, 2006, at 1:54 AM, Regg Mr wrote:

Can it be use in Client-Side and/or Server side web development?

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7

I use RadRails and it has served me admirably so far though you don’t
really NEED an IDE for Rails, but it’s useful.

I use SCITE for non-Rails R. work, which is bundled along with the
Ruby installer I used (I forgot which one) and that’s the best I’ve used
so far, but I’ve only done Ruby dev on Windows.

Ruby can be used to create both client side and server side apps – in
Projectible (http://www.projectible.com) the backend is done with Rails
while the front-end Windows app is a Ruby app done with FxRuby. The
Projectible client is a standalone Windows application, but it doesn’t
have a native look-and-feel. While some other widget toolkit can do
that, really native stuff on Windows can be done through COM using the
Win32 module.

Regg Mr wrote:

Can it be use in Client-Side and/or Server side web development?

–
Sau S.

http://blog.saush.com
http://www.projectible.com
http://jaccal.sourceforge.net