About Ruby Development in the NetBeans IDE

See Also

The NetBeans Ruby pack provides tools for programming in the Ruby language, including the JRuby platform and the Rails framework. Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Ruby support in NetBeans has the following features:

Ruby Platform Management

The Ruby pack includes a JRuby installation. You can use the Ruby Platform manager to register other JRuby and Ruby interpreters with the IDE.

Advanced Source Code Editor

This language-aware editor indents and completes your Ruby code and performs semantic syntax highlighting. The editor does live parsing of your code, matches words and brackets, marks errors and occurrences, displays hints and rdoc, and offers well integrated refactoring, debugging, and testing.

Ruby Gems Installation Manager

Built-in support for the Ruby Gems packaging system lets you easily add libraries to your Ruby and JRuby repositories, as well as get updates. To start the Gem Manager, choose Tools > Ruby Gems. The Installed tab shows the contents of the repository, and the Updated tab shows if there are new versions of installed gems. You use the New Gems tab to add gems to the repository.

Ruby on Rails

The NetBeans IDE provides easy access to Rails scripts. For example, the Rails Generator dialog box provides access to Rails code generators, such as the controller generator, model generator, and scaffold generator.

Many of the common rake tasks are integrated into the pop-up menus. For example, you can right-click on a project node and choose Migrate Database to invoke the rake db:migrate commands. All the project's rake targets can be accessed through the Run/Debug Rake Task action, which is available from the pop-up menu for the project node.

The Rails Plugins manager makes it easy to add plugins to your Rails projects as well as obtain updates.

The GlassFish V3 application server is included in the Ruby pack. In addition, the IDE supports the WEBrick and Mongrel web servers.

Interactive Ruby Shell and Rails Console Support

You can open an Interactive Ruby (IRB) shell in the IDE by right-clicking a Ruby or Ruby on Rails project node and choosing Ruby Shell (IRB). With Rails projects, you can also open a Rails console from the project node's pop-up menu.

NetBeans Ruby Web Pages

For more information about Ruby development in the NetBeans IDE, see the following web sites:

See Also
Working With NetBeans Ruby

Legal Notices