Ruby Screenshot of the Week #14: RHTML

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.

Phew - it's been a very busy past couple of weeks. We had feature freeze for NetBeans 6 just a couple of days ago (Friday night at midnight to be exact) so I was focusing all my energy on getting as many things done as possible by the deadline. From here on out, focus will be on stability. I'm starting to work my way through the bug list, and it's looking promising.

The feature I'd like to show this time is a recent addition: Improved RHTML support. In particular, RHTML completion, RHTML goto declaration, and displaying Ruby errors in RHTML files.

Here's RHTML completion (click for full size):

Things to notice here is that first of all, the various methods you might want completion (and more importantly, documentation) for that are coming from ActionView are showing up as expected - link_to, form_tag, and so on. In addition, methods from your Helper class for this controller also show up. There's also an inherited attribute from ActionView here.

Second, note the enhanced display of the rdoc. It turns out lots of Rails documentation have code snippets, and the colorizer (which I
discussed recently) now properly handles language embedding too - RHTML fragments containing Ruby and HTML colors.) Speaking of colors, NetBeans 6 recently got a makeover in the default color scheme. In addition, there are some new color themes available in the options dialog - including the old colors. You can see the new colors in these screenshots.

Go To Declaration is pretty self explanatory - it works the same way that it does in Ruby files; hold the Ctrl-key and click on identifiers and it will warp to the definition for that method, class or variable assignment. Another new feature is displaying source errors in the file. Behind the scenes, NetBeans now models what ERB will do to the file in a Rails server, and maps these errors back to the RHTML source. Thus, if you have an error like the below, you get an error annotation with a tooltip displaying the error:

One thing which is still missing is indentation of the Ruby code in RHTML files. Marek Fukala is working on this for all the embedded languages, and I believe this feature is still going in after the freeze, so look for it in upcoming builds.

Finally, thanks to those of you who have been using the regular builds and providing feedback and bug reports. I apologize for the last couple of weeks - because of the heavy feature focus before the deadline I haven't been very responsive, and the builds have gone through a huge amount of flux. One of the things which is going on is that all the keyboard shortcuts have been changing - the details are outlined here - so if you thought something was broken, perhaps it's just using a different shortcut now. (We're still tweaking this.) Things will get more and more stable from day to day now. Milestone 10 should be out in a couple of weeks.