Code easy with Ruby In Steel

What is Ruby in Steel?

Programming language Ruby is gaining popularity amongst software developers as an open source object oriented programming language. With its user base increasing by the day, product development companies are working around it to provide easy to use tools for the coder.

Ruby In Steel, from SapphireSteel Software is one such tool; it is a Ruby-programming environment for Visual Studio 2005.

Ruby in Steel version 1.0, codenamed ‘Red Fire’ was released in May 2006. SapphireSteel has announced the release of version 1.5 of Ruby in Steel developer, codenamed ‘YellowFire’.

The commercial Developer Edition of Ruby In Steel is aimed at professional Ruby and Rails programmers. It features the ‘Cylon’ debugger and ‘intelligent type inference’ engine to provide true IntelliSense even for a language as dynamic as Ruby.

Ruby In Steel is available in two editions, the free personal edition includes Ruby and RHTML (Rails template) editing with syntax color-coding, code collapsing, Ruby debugging, an integrated run-and-evaluate console, Ruby In Rails wizards, Ruby and Ruby In Rails project management. The commercial Developer Edition includes all of the above plus tooltip documentation, enhanced code navigation, auto-expand snippets, smart editing, IntelliSense and the optimized, fully integrated ‘Cylon’ debugger.

Currently the Steel IDE supports the standard Ruby interpreter only; it does not compile ‘native. NET’ programs. The Steel IDE is available only for the Windows platform only and not for OS X or Linux. However, code can be written using Visual Studio 2005 and the debugged Ruby script can run under other operating systems.

Some interesting features

A quick look at some handy features offered by Ruby in Steel:

Intellisense

Ruby In Steel Developer provides syntax and scope-sensitive IntelliSense tools including drop-down lists of methods, keywords, variables and parameter completion tooltips.

Member Completion

The tool can analyze source code as it is entered in order to provide code completion lists which take into account not only the class of an identifier but also its visibility due to scoping rules and its context within a source file (so, for example, if a variable, x is defined as a string on line 10 and as an Array on line 100, the appropriate completion lists will be provided at each location).

Parameter Completion

The parameters required by a method and its return type after you enter the opening bracket when calling that method, are automatically displayed by the IDE. As parameters in Ruby are untyped, their classes cannot be inferred. However, Ruby In Steel’s optional ‘type assertions’ let you specify the expected parameter and return types and these can then be shown in parameter completion tooltips.

QuickInfo ToolTips

When the source code of a class or method is preceded by a comment block, the comments will be displayed in a tooltip when the mouse hovers over a class or method name in the code editor. When an object of a known class has been created, its tooltip displays the name of its class.

For a complete overview of the product, visit Sapphire Steel

Download a free version of Ruby In Steel PE, here.