FreeRIDE Status

ruby-talk
1

Hi Curt,

I am interested if FreeRIDE will integrate “Form Design”, to make it a
full-blown IDE? Or only source-level debuging is planed? What can I expect
to see in FreeRIDE, which might be better than RDE?

Thanks a lot.
Shannon

···

From: “Curt Hibbs” curt@hibbs.com
Reply-To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org (ruby-talk ML), nemo@hellotree.com
CC: “Freeride-Devel”
freeride-devel@mail.freesoftware.fsf.org,ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: FreeRIDE Status
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 00:40:01 +0900

Chris wrote:

Hello,

I was wondering what was the story with FreeRIDE? About a month ago
there
was a lot of talk about it, but I haven’t heard much since. Is there
somewhere I can download it, or has it still not been released?
If not, is
there a timeframe for its (unofficial, of course :slight_smile: release date?

Anxiously looking forward to it (and very much appreciatively),

Chris

Thanks for your interest (and your patience!). I’m going to cross-post this
to the ruby ML to help keep everyone informed.

We haven’t yet made an official release. We’ve been fixing a few
show-stopper problems, cleaning up the code, and writing documentation.
Work
and family always seem to take priority, as well, so it has been taking
longer that we wanted. Our updated release task list is at:

rubyide.org

FreeRIDE runs pretty well (although we haven’t yet done any extensive QA
style testing), and if you are really anxious you can always get the latest
from CVS at:

FreeRIDE - CVS Repositories [Savannah]

The debugger doesn’t work under Windows right now, but I believe it is
working under Linux (Rich, am I right about this?).

Finally, if you subscribe to the FreeRIDE announce mailing list, you’ll be
among the first to know when the official release is available:

http://savannah.nongnu.org/mail/?group=freeride

Regards,
Curt

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2

FreeRIDE is plugin based, so something like form design will be
integrated as a plugin to the IDE. Right now we are getting basic
functionality completed. We are planning a powerful project manager as
well (with jabber integration :-). As for major differences from
RDE…not much in the initial alpha/beta…but that will change quickly.
Most importantly, FreeRIDE is written in Ruby so its extensible in
Ruby…RDE is not.

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Shannon Fang [mailto:xrfang@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 11:52 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: FreeRIDE Status

Hi Curt,

I am interested if FreeRIDE will integrate “Form Design”, to
make it a
full-blown IDE? Or only source-level debuging is planed? What
can I expect
to see in FreeRIDE, which might be better than RDE?

Thanks a lot.
Shannon

3

Rich Kilmer wrote:

From: Shannon Fang [mailto:xrfang@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 11:52 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: FreeRIDE Status

Hi Curt,

I am interested if FreeRIDE will integrate “Form Design”, to
make it a
full-blown IDE? Or only source-level debuging is planed? What
can I expect
to see in FreeRIDE, which might be better than RDE?

Thanks a lot.
Shannon

FreeRIDE is plugin based, so something like form design will be
integrated as a plugin to the IDE. Right now we are getting basic
functionality completed. We are planning a powerful project manager as
well (with jabber integration :-). As for major differences from
RDE…not much in the initial alpha/beta…but that will change quickly.
Most importantly, FreeRIDE is written in Ruby so its extensible in
Ruby…RDE is not.

I just wanted to expand on what Rich said a little bit.

Our vision for the FreeRIDE project is grand… very grand! Achieving that
vision will be incremental over time. Exactly how much time really depends
on how much other Ruby developers are interested, willing, and able to help
out.

We have quite a few Ruby developers who have signed up (see
rubyide.org), but over the past
year there has not been very much that most of them could do. We have
concentrated on implemented a basic set of IDE functions on top of an
extremely solid and flexible plugin architecture.

The goal was to enable (or better yet, to inspire) other Ruby developers
to create additional plugins to extend the core functionality of FreeRIDE.
And because FreeRIDE is written in 100% Ruby, you don’t have to leave your
favorite language to do this.

How fast we achieve our vision (and your vision, if you choose to
participate), and how far we take it depends entirely on the level of
interest and participation by the Ruby community. And not just in writing
plugins, either. There will always be a need for better documentation,
testing, localization for other languages, etc. So, don’t think that you
have to write FreeRIDE plugins in order to help out.

For example, we plan to originate all of our documentation from the FreeRIDE
wiki. So if you find and error, an area that is unclear, or you want to
write a how-to, its very easy to just go to our wiki (www.rubyide.org) and
make the changes – anyone can do that because we do not have any
restrictions on access, and even this level of participation would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks again to everyone for being patient!

Curt

···

-----Original Message-----