Ruby In Steel 1.2 Launched

Ruby In Steel 1.2 features The Visual Rails Workbench - a fully integrated visual design and coding environment for Ruby On Rails applications. According to SapphireSteel Technology Director, Huw Collingbourne, “The Visual Rails Workbench is the only tool which enables Rails developers to design pixel-perfect web pages using ordinary Rails templates. Up to now, Rails web page design has been largely a matter of guesswork. But with the help of The Visual Rails Workbench, users will be able to drag and drop controls from the Visual Studio toolbox, use the mouse to move and resize them and alter their properties in the normal Visual Studio Property panel.”

The Visual Rails Workbench offers complete ‘round-tripping’ between Rails format ‘embedded Ruby’ templates (Layouts, Views and Partials) and fully-formed HTML web pages. Embedded Ruby code is automatically translated to and from the corresponding HTML elements.

The principal features of the Visual Rails Workbench are:

 Full page editing of complete web pages (composites of Rails layouts/views/partials)
 Drag and Drop design - add controls from a toolbox
 Set properties using the Property panel
 Resize and move controls using mouse or keyboard
 Split view code/form editing
 Toggle ERb/RHTML editing between HTML editor and Rails (Ruby-aware) editor
 Round-tripping between ‘web format’ HTML and ‘Rails format’ ERb/RHTML
 Edit code as ERb/RHTML or as HTML
 Document Navigator navigates document structure (HTML)/or methods (ERB/Ruby)
 Quick navigation between controller and view
 Import/Export to other web page design tools such as Dreamweaver
 Save/restore named ‘versions’ of page designs to/from an archive of work in progress
 Auto-backup of changes to templates
 Support for Rails 1 and Rails 2

The Visual Rails Workbench is one of several significant new additions to Ruby In Steel 1.2.

Other notable features include:

 JRuby Support Users may run and debug Sun’s Java-based JRuby right inside the Ruby In Steel environment.
 IronRuby Support Ruby In Steel is the only IDE to offer integrated form design for Microsoft’s IronRuby (currently ‘alpha’).
 Enhanced Debugging Ruby In Steel has the fastest debugger for standard Ruby. In addition to all its existing capabilities (such as breakpoints, watch variables, call stack navigation, step into/out/over, locals, autos, drill-down debugging and debugging into ERb/RHTML templates)

Ruby In Steel 1.2 adds the following debugging features:

• Tracepoints
• Conditional breakpoints
• Break on hitcount
• Run macro on break
• Break on exception
• Autos window user-configuration
• Dynamic debugging (evaluate code and change variable values on the fly)

Ruby In Steel 1.2 has powerful Ruby and Rails code editing including IntelliSense/code completion, auto-expanding snippets plus a snippet editor, keyword..end matching, color coding, code folding, code formatting and smart indenting. It has dedicated editors for Rails templates (.erb/.rhtml) and numerous integrated tools for both Ruby and Rails development. The software is supplied with over 190 pages of documentation (pdf) and has a detailed integrated help system.

Ruby In Steel Developer 1.2 offers a powerful suite of Ruby and Rails design, development and debugging tools unrivalled by any other IDE.

Watch A Movie

From zero to drag-and-drop Blog design in under 7 minutes!

Watch this short Flash screencast to see all the steps needed to:
 Create a new Rails project
 Set up a database
 Verify the database connection
 Generate a Blog scaffold
 Run a Rake migration
 Update all files and folders in the Solution Explorer
 Enable the Visual Rails Workbench
 Load a Rails (ERb) template into the code editor
 Translate the ERb template into a ‘composite’ HTML page
 Resize controls in the HTML Page Designer
 Toggle between HTML design and code view
 Set properties and styles using the Property Panel
 Drag and Drop controls from the Toolbox onto the page
 Translate the re-designed HTML page back into ERb templates
 Round-trip to and from ERb and HTML
....all done in under 7 minutes!

 Watch The Movie

More Information...
 Ruby In Steel Overview
 Ruby In Steel Manual
 Ruby In Steel Feature List