Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Review: Ruby in Steel proves a speedy debugger

February 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Review: Ruby in Steel proves a speedy debugger

TAGS: Application development

SapphireSteel Software recently shipped Ruby in Steel Developer, a professional Ruby programming environment for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition and above. I have used Komodo, RadRails, and the free tools that ship with Ruby before, but Ruby in Steel improves on all of these in several ways.

Ruby in Steel Developer has advanced Ruby and RHTML editing and IntelliSense support, and allows fast debugging of Ruby and Rails applications. The fast debugging and IntelliSense support wowed me. SapphireSteel claims a 100x speedup for their Cylon debugger over the standard Ruby debugger, but I measured a 200x speedup during my work.

On the other hand, I thought that the way Ruby in Steel integrates Visual Studio with external Ruby and Rails tools and tests was OK, but not as nice as RadRails' integration.

While the ability to do fast debugging of Rails application is very valuable, it currently requires a rather complicated setup. If you need to debug multiple Ruby threads, you'll need to switch to the standard Ruby debugger (something that will be fixed in a later release). The need to switch between the Ruby in Steel RHTML editor and the Visual Studio HTML editor for complicated layouts is awkward; plans to add a visual layout editor for Rails pages in a later release should alleviate this problem.

Tire-kickers can download a 30-day free trial of Ruby in Steel Developer or an unlimited free copy of Ruby in Steel Personal Edition (PE), which lacks the fast debugger and IntelliSense. Of course, those two features are the best parts -- so getting the full version will be worth it to professional developers.

Ruby in Steel Developer
Cost: Launch special: $199; rises to $249 with release of version 1.1
Availability: Now
Verdict: Any serious professional Ruby developer who has a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional or above should at least try out Ruby in Steel Developer. If you're like me, the asking price will seem cheap for the combination of the fast debugging and the great IntelliSense support.

Posted by Martin Heller on February 12, 2007 11:04 AM

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