Ruby Screnshot of the Weeek #17: Spelll Checkinng

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.

One of my favorite plugins for NetBeans 5.5 was Jan Lahoda's spell checker.
It turns out Jan has updated it to work with NetBeans 6.0, so I wrote some bindings for it to work with Ruby as well.
Briefly, it highlights spelling errors in comments and documentation (=begin/=end) sections. This also works in
embedded Ruby code in RHTML files, and in RHTML files it also spell checks the text content. Ok, screenshots:

The above is the documentation for Rails' url_for method. As you can see there are a couple of typos.
If you place the caret on one of the words a lightbulb will appear in the left side gutter; press Alt-Enter
to see the possible fixes:

As you can see, you can very easily add known words that aren't in the default dictionary to your own private list.

Here's an RHTML/ERB file:

Since this is a file in one of my own projects, NetBeans offers to add this word to a project-specific dictionary. This wasn't available for the above Rails source file since it's in a library outside of my projects.

The Ruby spell checker currently skips words in comments that look like Ruby identifiers, such as
CamelCase words, method_name words, and :symbols. Single-character words are also skipped. Finally, it skips
rdoc preformatted text (indented comment content) since that typically contains code fragments which contain
lots of unrecognized words. It might be an interesting improvement to try to help with typos in actual
class and method names, such as a "Controler", but I've gotta figure out a way to avoid generating tons of false positives here (what's a Scanf? :-)

I've uploaded a version which should work with NetBeans 6.0 here. Unzip it, then go to the Tools | Plugin Manager, open the "Downloaded" tab and install the individual nbm files. (You may have to restart the IDE.) The zip includes an English dictionary. This is the dictionary from ispell (unzip the dictionary.nbm file and you'll see it). You can add other languages in the Options dialog; these should be ispell dictionaries. You can also change the text locale in the Options dialog; when I opened some files in the RSpec distribution it immediately complained about the British spelling "behaviour" instead of the American spelling, "behavior". I presume this would be fixed by switching from en_US to en_GB (both are included).

P.S. Somebody asked me for 6.0-compatible versions of the strip-whitespace and highlight-tabs modules; here
they
are.

P.S.2. The spell checker modules obviously work for Java too; if you've been looking for NetBeans 6.0 spell checking, grab the same .zip but skip installing the ruby-bindings .nbm file.

Back from vacation

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 came back from a wonderful week in Hawaii, on the big island. The highlight was obviously our wedding. We had planned to get married on August 14th, on the beach at sunset, but because of Hurricane Flossie most beaches were scheduled to close. It didn't turn out to be a problem - we just got married a day earlier. It was a wonderful moment and we were thrilled to have our children there to be part of it. And obviously the rest of the vacation was great too - how can you go wrong with volcanoes (both the world's most active volcano, Kilauea, and the world's largest volano, Mauna Loa), waterfalls, snorkeling over coral reefs with turtles and tropical fish, and ....
piña coladas ?

It will take me a few days to get the sand out of my shoes, the tropical air out of my sun hat and get through my huge inbox. Apologies to those of you waiting for some sort of response from me!

Ruby Screenshot of the Week #15: More Hints and Quick Fixes!

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.

Ola Bini just posted a blog entry entitled "Ruby Is Hard". In the blog entry he shows a short code snippet which does not do what you might think upon reading it. This immediately reminded me of a dog-eared page in my worn-out copy of "Programming Ruby", specifically page 167, in the "But It Doesn't Work" section. The book covers the same problem and explains what the problem is and how to fix it.

I had marked the page for myself because when I first read it, I thought "that's something the IDE should be able to detect and warn you about!". So when I came across Ola's blog entry yesterday I figured I really should do something about it - and I had the perfect opportunity: A Java Posse recording session at Dick's new house last night. I've claimed before that writing quick fixes for Ruby in NetBeans is easy, and it really is - I completed this one as a background activity while having fun with the rest of the Posse. We are however past feature freeze for NetBeans 6, so when I'm adding fun features like this I put it into the "Experimental Hints" module, which is not part of NetBeans 6. It -is- however included in the continuous "Ruby IDE" builds you can get here - and you can also install it using the Plugin Manager in standard NetBeans.

So without further ado, here's what you get when you now open up Ola's example and the "Programming Ruby" example in NetBeans with the new hints:

As you can see, it's detecting the case there are local variable name assignments that match a writable attribute in the current class. If you hover over the warning it will tell you so:

If you hit Alt-Enter, you can see the possible fixes:

These should be pretty self-explanatory. At first you may go "Huh?" and jumping to the relevant attribute may help you figure it out. The second fix will simply change the assignment to the recommended form, and the third fix will let you rename the local variable to avoid any confusion.

In order to avoid any false positives I ran this hint over a large code base (all the Ruby libraries and Rails libraries) and it came up with a handful of warnings. These probably aren't bugs, but it's at least potentially confusing; here's baseData.rb from Ruby's SOAP library:

There are some other experimental hints too, in particular, a hint which detects actions in your controllers that don't have associated view files and offers to create them (using the Rails code generator), as well as various name warnings. Here's a warning which detects un-Ruby-like method names and local variable names (camelCase instead of not_camel_case) - this one from a Rails test case:

Here's the current customizer. Some of the hints are not enabled by default, so you should inspect these yourself and enable those you are interested in. One hint I definitely didn't want to enable by default is the "constant name" warning. I was under the impression that constants should use all upper-case letters separated by underscores, and this is indeed the case in lots and lots of Ruby code. But there are quite a few exceptions, where constants are just capitalized - so this seems like a warning that may need some tweaking or is an individual preference. Here's the customizer:

In other news, a lot of bug fixing is happening so stay up to date with the builds :)