Curne Simon wrote:>
> Hi,
>
> Before I get thwacked: I am all for Ruby so this is not one of those
> programming language discussions.
>
> ...but I was just wondering if anyone has thought about this: What can
> FreeRIDE bring to the world that Eclipse cannot? If the answer is "it
> will run in Ruby instead of that pesky Sun crap" are we then heading
> for a world with a separate IDE for every language, each written in
> that language? One each for Ruby, Perl, Python, Lisp, Java, C, Delphi?
When Rich Kilmer and I started the FreeRIDE project, I originally *wanted*
to leverage all of the effort that had gone into the Eclipse code base.
There were two reasons why I abandoned this.
First, I wanted to be able to write all of the plugin code in Ruby, not
Java. When I investigated the Eclipse plugin api, I found that it would be
no problem to call Ruby Code from an Eclipse plugin that was written in
Java, but there was no way to dynamically register event handlers that were
written in Ruby (if the registration mechanism allowed an arbitrary
"user"
parameter that would be passed back to the event handler, this would have
solved the problem).
Second, Rich convinced me (correctly so) that it would be in FreeRIDE''s
best
interest to get widespread participation by the ruby developer community to
help augment its feature set. Requiring a 200MB+ Java/Eclipse development
environment would be a significant barrier (especially to those Ruby
developers that are *not* also Java developers).
Curt