CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki3 8 ISPPSI

Interface Segregation Principle vs. Principle of Small Interfaces

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Introduction

This page tries to review Integrated Development Environments for Ruby such as Aptana,Rubymine and Netbeans. Also the IDEs are compared with respect to certain dimensions such as facilities, ease of use, system requirements, and support for the Ruby way of thinking.

Interface Segregation Principle

   * “Many client specific interfaces are better than one general purpose interface“
   * “The dependency of one class to another one should depend on the smallest possible interface“
   * “Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.“
   * “Clients should not be forced to depend upon interfaces that they don’t use. This principle deals with the disadvantages of fat interfaces. Fat interfaces are not cohesive. In other words the interfaces of classes should be broken into groups of member functions.“
 

Comparision of Aptana,Netbeans and Rubymine

Three IDEs namely Aptana's Radrails, Netbeans and Rubymine are compared in the following sections.

Features for Ruby

s]General

	Radrails	Netbeans	Rubymine
Price	Free	Free	$99
License Type	Open Source	Open Source	Commercial
Available Standalone or as Eclipse Plugin	Available	Not Available	Not Available

Editing

	Radrails	Netbeans	Rubymine
Code completion	Available	Available	Available
Syntax Highlighting	Available	Available	Available
Code analysis (warnings/errors/hints)	Available	Available	Available
spell checking support	Available	Available	Available
Type Hierarchy View	Available	Not Available	Available
Smart Indent	Available	Available	Available

snapshot for Aptana Radrails editing features

snapshot for Netbeans editing features

snapshot for Rubymine features

Refactoring

Refactoring is a disciplined technique for improving the structure of existing code without changing the observable behavior. Refactoring improves the design of software. Refactoring makes software easier to understand. Refactoring makes software easier to maintain. Refactoring helps you find bugs. Refactoring helps you program faster.

	Radrails	Netbeans	Rubymine
Renaming	Available	Available	Available
Extract method	Available	Available	Available
Extract partial	Not Available	Not Available	Available
Inline class	Available	Not Available	Available
Inline method	Available	Not Available	Available
Safely Delete	Not Available	Available	Available

Netbeans refactoring features

Rubymine refactoring features

Version Control Integration

Netbeans IDE directly supports CVS root types.In Netbeans SVN access is via custom protocol to an SVN server. Netbeans supports Git kenai.com subversion ,mercurial,and Git repositories.Even we can specify our external source code.

Rubymine has CVS installed and turned on automatically. Git integration is enabled. It supports SVN repositories too along with perforce( one of the subversions) integration

Radrails has the feature to install the three things as plugins.

	Radrails	Netbeans	Rubymine
SVN	Available	Available	Available
Git	Available	Available	Available
CVS	Available	Available	Available

Debugging Features

All the Three IDE's supports ruby-debuggers.

Netbeans supports classic debugger which is slow and ruby debugger, which is fast and only works with native ruby interpreter.

Radrails also supports classic and ruby debugger. Classic is a pure ruby debugger based on debug.rb script. Classic 1.8.0 and 1.8.2 works on windows. It also offers ability to run a debugger using ruby debug gem as background.

Rubymine offers ruby debugging. Rubymine has convenient user interface. It allows smart and flexible breakpoint insertions. It also allows remote debugging features. It has Built in Expression Evaluator.

Debugging using Rubymine

Debugging using netbeans

[http://vimeo.com/channels/radrails#6450292 Debugging using radrail

Other Features available in IDE's

In addition to Ruby support the IDE's offer support to other scripting languages also. The Features available are listed below in each of the three IDE's under consideration

	Radrails	Netbeans	Rubymine
HTML	Available	Available	Available
CSS	Available	Available	Available
JavaScript	Available	Available	Available
JavaScript	Available	Available	Available
XML	Available	Available	Available
SQL	Available	Available	Not Available

Conclusion

The Three IDE's have been compared for different features. It is very difficult to conclude which IDE is best suited for Ruby. All the three IDE's provide many features in Ruby. Radrails is available as a plugin for eclipse. Users comfortable working with Eclipse can use this plugin and use Ruby on Eclipse. Netbeans provide support for other languages like Java, C++, etc along with Ruby. It is best suited if users like to use other languages along with Ruby. RubyMine is designed only for Ruby. RubyMine provides many Refactoring Tools which are not available in Radrails and Netbeans

References

1.RubyMine Documentation
2.Different IDE comparisions 
3.Netbeans Wiki
4.Netbeans.org
5.Aptana.com
6.Radrails wiki
7.Reviews on different IDE's 

Information from different IDE's help section is also considered for creating this wiki document.