Ruby Screenshot of the Week #6

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

I just realized last night that the session slides for my

Java One talk

are due today! So I did a marathon session, starting at 6am this morning, putting it all together. I just submitted the slides, with a whole 4 minutes to spare before the midnight deadline. That's 18 hours straight with just a short dinner break. Phew.

So I'm going to cheat for this week's Ruby screenshot. Take a look at the following picture; it shows two new NetBeans 6 features applied to Ruby: Local editing file history (with version diffing), and the brand new diff view. I've long thought that the Mac OSX XCode filemerging window reigned supreme, but with the new smooth spline curves and even character diffing within lines, I have a new favorite! This file is not under version control - the local file history feature tracks local edits and lets you diff auto-saved versions.

Full size

I know this is cheating since all I did was bring up a Ruby editor on non-Ruby related functionality. But there have actually been some great improvements in the Ruby support in the last week. First, the Ruby debugger support has landed! Second, native Ruby execution should now be working finally on Unix, including with Rails. There are some other changes too (plus some pending one I'm about to check in). Check the wiki for installation instructions - to get fast debugging you'll need to perform some manual steps.

Zzzz